the wound | hannah holtzclaw
keep knocking up against these walls and ceilings.
feeling stuck inside this box.
these expectations, imprint themselves against my skin.
[in the thick of usurpation, turbid thoughts]hard to tell where the world ends and my self begins.
entangled predelections exhaust.
histories, dance across my skinburning permanence, pattern painted thoughts.
not sure where my line of intention is
trying to get a sense of whats mine and whats not
sondering within the fret,
dropping threads,
a perpetual promenade between is and ought.
On the Coloniality, of the Cartesian-Colonial habit: European philosophy and ego conquiro
This section’s purpose is to illustrate how there have always been colonies, imperial white-supremacy, at the center of Heidegger; at the center of 20th century European Philosophy and ‘modern’ education—an epistemic position that renders relations of subordination and domination within the world through all that it shapes and informs, technology included.
To be clear, I do not mean to oversimplify what I understand as a dynamic and relational absence of what decolonial theorists Walter Mignolo has identified as ‘The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference” or what Ariella Azoulay calls ‘Imperial Differential Rule’ (Azoulay, 2019; Mignolo, 2000). The manifestation of the geopolitics of knowledge and colonial differential rule can be traced back to 1492. Though as Azoulay and decolonial theorists Walter Mignolo and Anibal Quijano have shown, the imperial plunder takes place at geographically different times and places with shifting social and political contours, its epistemological and ontological dimensions of dominance, dislocation and dispossession remain at the heart of western civilisation and the ‘modern’/colonial global system (Qujano, 2007; Mignolo, 2000).
While it is narratively convenient to render colonial logic as “historical”, and present ‘modernity’ as the enlightened advancement beyond colonialism, monarchy and other pre-capitalist systems, as Mignolo and Quijano note, locating “modernity” as chronologically manifest within the 18th century, erases the Iberian foundational period of capitalist and colonial expansion (Mignolo, 2000; Quijano, 2007). This absence is significant because it overlooks the construction (and exploitation) of the global south as well as the role of the trans Atlantic slave trade circuit in constructing “modernity”. Both reveal coloniality as not merely constitutive, but ontologically and epistemologically generative of modernity as a world-system (Mignolo, 2000, 60-61). The conquest of the peoples and cultures of what is known today as Latin America was the catalyst for a series of processes that violently concentrated much of the worlds resources within the hands of a small European minority; obliged by the enslavement and domination of millions of African and Latin American peoples (Quijano, 2007). This concentration of power gained inertia and concretized throughout the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th century, to today, where as Quijano details, “[t]he ‘Western’ European dominators and their Euro-North American descendants are still the principle beneficiaries” (ibid, 2)[1]. Hence, colonialism as a political system, gave way to an imperial ‘Modernity’: a Eurocentered colonial system of political, social, and cultural domination that grounds not only European Philosophy but all of ‘modern’ (and ‘postmodern’) scientific and historical thought (Mignolo, 2000; Quijano, 2007; Azoulay 2019).
Hence, the gap and critique of Frankfurt School critical theory (as well it’s prodigies) this research seeks to outline is similar to thinkers that subvert the habituation of western philosophy. Such as Emmanuel Levinas, who illustrate, as decolonial scholar Nelson Maldanado Torres has pointed out, the difference and potentialities opened by thinking within (not merely including) perspectives that have been historically marginalized, indeed culturally desecrated by western thought ( Maldanado-Torres, 2007,p241).
In contrast to Heidegger, Levina’s thought is marked by being a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust. An experience of which led him to become one of his most radical opposers and perhaps more importantly, in his critique, making the link between ontology and power (Maldanado-Torres, 2007, p242). Exemplified in such works like that of his essay Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism:
“How is universality compatible with racism? The answer-to be found in the logic of what first inspires racism- involves a basic modification of the very idea of universality. Universality must give way to the idea of expansion, for the expansion of a force presents a structure that is completely different from the propagation of an idea...In spite of the unique accent communicated to it by its creator, it becomes a common heritage. It is fundamentally anonymous. The person who accepts it becomes its master, as does the person who proposes it. The propagation of an idea thus creates a community of "masters"; it is a process of equalization…. But force is characterized by another type of propagation. The person who exerts force does not abandon it. Force does not disappear among those who submit to it. It is attached to the personality or society exerting it, enlarging that person or society while subordinating the rest. Here the universal order is not established as a consequence of ideological expansion; it is that very expansion that constitutes the unity of a world of masters and slaves. .” (Levinas, 1990, p68)
Furthermore, Levinas’ in, As if Consenting to Horror, a reflection on whether Heidegger’s support for the Nazi regime necessitates evil laden within Heidegger’s work in Being and Time, takes care in suggesting that evil is never so unidirectional or simplistic and defaulting to a position that fixes its representation ultimately forecloses our understanding, indeed our recognition of its praxis:
“Can we be assured, however, that there was never any echo of Evil in it? The diabolical is not limited to the wickedness popular wisdom ascribes to it and whose malice, based on guile, is familiar and predictable in an adult culture. The diabolical is endowed with intelligence and enters where it will. To reject it, it is first necessary to refute it. Intellectual effort is needed to recognize it. Who can boast of having done so? Say what you will, the diabolical gives food for thought.” (1989, 488)
The refusal to oversimplify violence as merely about good versus evil finds resonance in the persistence of colonial impositions like racism and sexism, and pivot us towards a subversion of European phenomenological and ontological positions that take as their premise and beginning Man’s encounter with the world and/or the act of thinking. Put another way, the Diabolical is dynamic, processual, emergent out of a set of conditions. It is a certain poisoning. It can’t be censored or easily removed because it emerges out of a colonial and imperial positioning; Levinas paved way for discussions about the colonial presupposition. Holding the door open for decolonial scholars of the likes of Nelson Maldanado-Torres, Walter Mignolo and Enrique Dussel towards ways of knowing that instead concern themselves with ethics and the bodily demands of face-to-face, subject-Other encounters: or, the relational demands of transontological difference.
To begin from this position, it is crucial to articulate the role of coloniality in ‘modern’ identity formation. Only then can we begin to fully come to terms with the conditions and relations for identity the coloniality of being creates and seeks; as well as what it forecloses and destroys. Situating the problem of the cartesian-colonial habit explicitly within its colonial roots, allows me to articulate decolonial commitments as the necessary antithesis to contemporary regimes of knowing and being that are fundamentally violent; and as such, detrimental to both human and non-human life.
In short, a decolonial turn or commitment, returns us to several fundamental truths obscured and estranged by the cartesian-colonial habit: 1. self is always already threaded through with that which is excluded; that which is outside, other, and absent; self is always fundamentally shot through and shaped by the other and all else; and 2. Being is ultimately an ongoing creative relation of reciprocity and participation with the world and its human and nonhuman inhabitants.
I turn to the work of decolonial theorist Nelson Maldanado-Torres who in turn draws on the work of Enrique Dussel, Emmanual Levinas, as well as Walter Mignolo and Franz Fanon, to examine the bases of modernity/coloniality that transforms the coloniality of power, to the coloniality of being.
Enrique Dussel offers a point of entry with regards to the rhetoric of modernity cultivated by Frankfurt school theorists. In one of his Frankfurt Lectures he proceeds as follows:
“Modernity is, for many (for Jurgen Habermas or Charles Taylor) an essentially or exclusively European phenomenon... Modernity appears when Europe affirms itself as the ‘center’ of a World History that it inaugurates: the ‘periphery’ that surrounds this center is consequently part of its self-definition. The occlusion of this periphery (and of the role of Spain and Portugal in the formation of the modern world system from the late fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries)leads the major contemporary thinkers of the ‘center’ into a Eurocentric fallacy in their understanding of modernity. If their understanding of the genealogy of modernity is thus partial and provincial, their attempts at a critique or defense of it are likewise unilateral and, in part, false.” (1995, p65)
Dussel in this lecture ties the concept of modernity to the Spanish reconquest of the Kingdom of Granada from Islamic rule in 1492 and the colonization of the Andalusia. Dussel highlights how the “broken treaties, elimination of local elites, endless massacres and tortures, the demand that the conquered betray their religion and culture under pain of death or expulsion, the confiscation and repartition in feudal form of lands, towns, and their inhabitant to the officers of the conquering army” consequently provided the model for the colonial pursuits in the New World and the rendering of Latin America as “first periphery” of modern Europe (ibid 67). The global effects of this moment (or ‘myth’) of origin would set in motion the generative and constitutive process of ‘modernization’ in Africa and Asia as well, where the connection between Eurocentrism and its associated “fallacy of developmentalism” were imposed unilaterally upon other cultures across the world (ibid). But drawing on Hegel and Kant, Dussel shows how ‘development’ was framed and applied as a form “necessary movement” from humanity’s alleged state of “guilty immaturity”; “laziness”; “cowardice” adolescence, towards an enlightened and developed consciousness (ibid, p67-69). Where through Doctrines of Discovery, Eurocentrism delegitimized (by violent force) pre-existing ways of knowing and being within Latin America, Africa and Asia, so that “Spirit’s freedom” could be fully realized through the “moment of development” and the rational, individual, self—courtesy of explicitly Christian principles.
Concurrently, Dussel links both Hegel’s and Habermas’s discounting of the ‘discovery’ of the Americas as the violent, necessary imperative to modernity, where the ‘civil society’ of Europe transcends the state through colonies in the New World. Hegel, he writes, does not clearly comprehend that the myth of ‘free space’ in the peripheries of Europe, of which allowed, “the poor, produced by contradictions of capitalist development, to become capitalists or property owners themselves in the colonies” of the New World, necessitated a dispossession, exploitation (if not complete annihilation) and dislocation of pre-existing cultures and peoples (ibid 74). That “new possibilities” or ‘transcendental’ subjectivity for the poor and down trodden of Europe, meant the rearticulation of dominant/subordinate relations elsewhere. Thus, Dussel writes, “[t]this process of discovery and conquest…is not simply of anecdotal or historical interest: It is part of the process of the constitution of modern subjectivity itself.” (67). Reason and rationality, as well as their critique, are dependent upon a vision of modernity that necessitates an asymmetrical Other in order to manifest a Self; and willfully, through violence, and through both discursive and material erasure and exclusion, ensures they can neither intervene in such “critiques” or conversations (ibid 76). Hence, to critique and deal with the problem of interface, be it technology as language, device, or institutional policy, one must deal with the resonances of coloniality in identity and being.
Ego conquiro
Maldanado-Torres, in The Coloniality of Being, illustrates how cartesian subjectivity was established along a particular axis of power. Namely, domination structured around the idea of race and global markets. Through coloniality, the codification of difference was established through racialized terms of the conqueror and the conquered. The objectification of conquered land and peoples through capitalism became a means of controlling resources and labour. Through slavery and serfdom at best and cultural genocide at worst, this system of domination and subordination was central to maintaining colonial control in the Americas (2007, P243-244).
Maldanado-Torres, drawing on the work of Enrique Dussel, points to Spanish Conquestador Hernan Cortes’s expression of ideal subjectivity, one predating Rene Descarte’s ego cogito, of ego conquiro. Whereby, the significance of Cartesian subjectivity derived from the European enlightenment, must be understood first and foremost, “against the backdrop of an unquestioned ideal of self expressed in the notion of the ego conquiro. The certainty of the self as a conqueror, of its tasks and missions” (2007, p.245). Thus, for Maldanado-Torres, the skepticism generated towards the humanity of the conquered barbarian became not only the justification for domination and subordination, but also constituted an imperial attitude. Of which served to form the basis for cartesian formations of identity, or “modern Imperial Man” (2007, p. 245):
“point of view also leads to the idea that it would be impossible to provide an adequate account of the crisis of modern Europe without reference, not only to the limits of a Cartesian view of the world, but also to the traumatic effects of Manichean misanthropic skepticism and its imperial ethos.” (2007, p. 245-246)
Such ethos can be seen through the accomplishments of instrumental rationality and ego cognito, in the way that notions of progress, freedom, or Rights of Man do not inherently extend equally to all, as their assertion in the first account presupposes universal or shared definitions of which the conquered in question have been stripped in contributing or ascribing to (2007, p.246). Thus, “ the preferential option for the ego conquiro [explains] why security for some can conceivably be obtained at the expense of the lives of others” (2007, p. 246), as coloniality is a process by which the transcendental moment of subjectivity arrives at the behest of an ethical forgetfulness or selectiveness, where “exceptions to ethical relationships become the norm” (2007,p. 259). Foreclosing the horizon of interaction amongst peoples; indeed any Other way knowing and being within the world, “by actually giving birth to a world in which lordship and supremacy rather than generous interaction define social dynamics in society.” (2007, p.259)
The Non-Ethics of War
Coloniality then must be understood as an ontologically significant event in the history of human societies with which notions of Self emerged in response and relation, always already perforated and shot through, by colonial dispositions of Otherness. Achieved at the expense of subordination , indeed the violence against, the conquered peoples of the Americas. This condition of individual agency is then shaped, by what Maldanado-Torres asserts as, “a transformation and naturalization of the non-ethics of war”:
“This non-ethics included the practices of eliminating and slaving certain subjects - e.g., indigenous and black - as part of the enterprise of colonization. The hyperbolic expression of coloniality includes genocide, which is the paroxysm of the ego cogito - a world in which the ego cogito exists alone. War, however, is not only about killing or enslaving. War includes a particular treatment of sexuality and of feminity: rape. Coloniality is an order of things that put people of color under the murderous and rapist sight of a vigilant ego. And the primary targets of rape are women.” (2007, p247-248)
Thus, cartesian-coloniality’s non-ethics are a violent racialization of identity that is also explicitly, gendered, “the ego conquiro is constitutively a phallic ego as well” (2007, p248).
Maldanado-Torres then, in recourse to Descartes, postulates three categories of Fanonian meditations necessary for reflection on the coloniality of being: Trans-ontological difference: the difference between Being and what is beyond Being; or Being and exteriority, Ontological difference: the difference between Being and beings, and Sub-ontological/ontological colonial difference: the difference between Being and what lies below Being or that which is negatively marked as dispensable as well as a target of rape and murder (2007, p. 253-254).
The latter is a product of the coloniality of being where:
“The same ideas that inspire perverted acts in war, particularly slavery, murder and rape, are legitimized in modernity through the idea of race and gradually are seen as normal to a great extent thanks to the alleged obviousness and non-problematic character of Black slavery and anti-Black racism. To be sure those who suffer the consequences of such a system are primarily Blacks and indigenous peoples, as well as all of those who appear as colored. In short, this system of symbolic representations, the material conditions that in part produce it and continue to legitimate it, and the existential dynamics that occur therein, which are also at the same time derivative and constitutive of such a context, are part of a process that naturalizes the non-ethics of war.” (Maldanado-Torres, 2007, p.254-255)
It is these non ethics of war that become particularly important when addressing the habits of being embedded within modern institutions, technology and ways of knowing. Understanding the racialized and gendered violence the colonial habit instantiates, is not a call for mere reconciliation, acknowledgement or inclusion, it is also a call to pay attention to the ways this violence against Other is fundamentally always already a violence done to ourselves[2]. What ego conquiro reveals is that the racist and sexist impasse of modern scientific and social development is predicated on a dehumanization, a dislocation or dismemberment, of a fundamental ontological difference that is always inevitably interwoven with how we see or don’t see, the damne` [3]and ourselves[4]. As Quijano points out, under the reign of a differential politic,
“[t]he differentiated individual subjectivity is real’, but it is not an entity, to it doesn’t exist only vis-a-vis itself or by itself. It exists as a differentiated part, but not separated, of an intersubjectivity or intersubjective dimension of a social relationship. Every individual discourse, or reflection, remits to a structure of intersubjectivity. The former is constituted in and vis a vis the latter. Knowledge in this perspective is an intersubjective relation…” (2007, p173)
Where knowledge as an intersubjective relation, is not one of atomized individual interiority and something else, but an intersubjective queer relationship between entangled subjectivities and their exteriority for the purpose of something else. Maldanado-Torres, turns to Emmanuel Levinas to elaborate on that which ties the interiority of being intimately with the exterior of being, the transontological imperative of being in and of the world:
Levinas argues that gift-giving and reception are fundamental traits of the self. Giving is first and foremost for Levinas a metaphysical act that makes possible the communication between a self and an Other as transontological as well as the sharing of a common world. Without giving to an Other there would be no self just as without receiving from the Other there would be no reason. In short, without a trans-ontological moment there would be no self, no reason, and no Being. The trans-ontological is the foundation of the ontological. For Levinas, the ontological, the realm of being, comes to exist out of the introduction of justice into the trans-ontological relation”(2007, p.258)
We see this echoed most reverently in the concluding chapters of Black Skin, White Masks, with Fanon’s final words laying bare the fundamental imperative of trans/ontological difference, “Superiority? Inferiority? Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself? Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the You?” (1986, p.231-232). For Fanon, the countering of the force and legitimacy of European modernity and its dynamics of possession, its logic of dehumanization and subordination demanded, “a war against war oriented by ’love’”, specifically, to situating love as ethics within notions of trans/ontological differences (Maldanado-Torres, 2007, p.256). Indeed, the restoration of humanity as givers in perpetual and reciprocal generous exchange, denies all politics of possession the coloniality of being imposes; it is colonization and its extensions, its obligatory subjugation upon bodies, that instantiates the death instinct [5]we wield upon ourselves and other.
El conquiro provides we all find ourselves “in a world in which things do evil; a world in which I am summoned into battle; a world in which it is always a question of annihilation or triumph.” (Fanon, 1986, p.228) Leaving us two paths to transcendence: domination or death. Thus, a turn to decolonial commitments ought to destabilize el conquiro and el cogito as bodily and institutional habits that serve to buttress these conditions. Where love as ethics, understands social totality as the radical threadedness of entangled subjectivities in reciprocal exchange with the world and all else.
Restoring the Gift: The Decolonial Turn
“And, if Sartre has appeared to formulate a description of love as frustration, his Being and Nothingness amounting only to an analysis of dishonesty and inauthenticity, the fact remains that true, authentic love—wishing for others what one postulates for oneself, when that postulation unites the permanent values of human reality—entails the mobilization of psychic drives basically freed of unconscious conflicts... Today I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions.” (Fanon, 1986, p.41)
Thus what is crucial to this discussion, is the notion that the coloniality of being is by no means an inherent nor inevitable outcome or mode to being, indeed we might understand it instead, as an unnatural pollutant, a toxin, soiling the dynamic relations involved in the creation of meaning. A disease, that, “shows itself forth when the preservation of Being (in any of its determinations: national ontologies, identitarian ontologies, etc.) takes primacy over listening to the cries of those whose humanity is being denied.” (Maldanado-Torres, 2007.p 257) Furthermore, a restoration of humanity, of being, requires a theory of a healing, indeed an ethics of love that dismantles imperial man and the paradigm of war imposed in his wake. Where agency is defined in relation to, “a world oriented by the ideals of human generosity and receptivity. This is the precise meaning of decolonization: restoration of the logic of the gift.” (Maldanado-Torres, 2007, p.260)
The gift that it is a trans/ontological experience; of difference. This work, then, understands decoloniality and its discourse to be concepts, expressions that act as invitations to dialogue and respond to desires for new meaning to be exchanged across and through different ways of knowing. (2007, 261) In such a way (as best put by Fanon), “[t]hat the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. That is, of one by another. That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be.” (Fanon, 1986, p.231)
Decolonial commitments, then, are not ones of mere representation and its exclusion/inclusion terms of being, they include, but more appropriately extend beyond acknowledgement and reconciliation. More appropriately it is a performative ethos that ceases to engage in the neurotic[6] demands of colonial being and instead pursues rehumanizing efforts to breakdown “hierarchies of difference that dehumanize subjects and communities”, and explores methods for, “the production of counter-discourses, counter-knowledges, and counter-creative acts and counter-practices that seek to dismantle coloniality and open up other forms of being within the world” (Maldanado-Torres, 2016, p.10).
Such commitments, introduce questions regarding the embodied effects of the coloniality of being in modern societies and subjectivities, in order to create space for alternative ways of knowing and relating to the world and each other to emerge; that are ideally committed to the creative generation of meaning more suitable to a collectively implicated world of human and nonhuman being. Where learning, indeed knowing, does not serve to extend, verify, or preference el cogito and its binary non ethics, but rather actively pursues its unraveling:
“The Decolonial Turn is about making visible the invisible and about analyzing the mechanisms that produce such invisibility or distorted visibility in light of a large stock of ideas that must necessarily include the critical reflections of the ‘invisible’ people themselves. Indeed, one must recognize their intellectual production as thinking not only as culture or ideology… a fundamental shift in perspective that leads one to see the world anew in a way that allows one to target its evils in a new way and that gives us a better sense of what to do next…” (Maldanado-Torres, 2007, p.262)
Crucially, decolonial commitments are about doing. Not isolating ideas and change in ways that divorce knowledge from action or theory from practice. Rather, decolonial commitments “combine knowledge, practice, and creative expressions, among other areas in their efforts to change the world. “(Maldanado-Torres, 2016, p.7) Indeed, we are thinking with and from within the absences, silences, and gaps that mark and sustain el cogito’s reign. This very much means that decolonial commitments are rife with conflict and imperfections. Unlearning habits is a process that requires feedback and ongoing dialogue in order for new formations of being, new habits, to be developed and sustained. Furthermore, this more pointedly suggests they must remain open to amendments and transformation, “Neither perfect nor pure, decoloniality is rather an attitude that keeps subjects and collectives open to growth and corrections as well as an unfinished project.” (Maldanado-Torres, 2016, p.31)
Technologies of decolonization do not name and cannot name, the outside, absence, unknown or beyond, from within the colonial matrix of power[7]. As detailed elsewhere, when we are positioned above and outside of the world we are a part of, in all its colonial and imperial inheritance, we are offered little insight as to how we contribute to or transcend its violence. The imperial differential transitions in the global south that extend the coloniality of being, are marked by the social transformation of Third World countries (who were manifest as 3rd through their exploitation) by the imposition of First World academic, corporate and governmental structures, as Mignolo writes:
“The scenario is simple: Western expansion was not only eco-nomic and political but also educational and intellectual. The Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism was accepted in former colonies as ‘‘our own’’ critique of Eurocentrism; socialist alternatives to liberalism in Europe were taken, in the colonies, as a path of liberation without making the distinction between emancipation in Europe and liberation in the colonial world. Quite simply, the colonial difference was not considered in its epistemic dimension….” (64)
This conceptual enframing bleeds through institutionalized epistemic biases beholden and gripped by the omnipresent imposition of coloniality within liberal academics. To theorize within an institution that standardizes education and pedagogy through disciplinary enclosures[8], ethnocentrism, credibility metrics, methodologically stunted scientific practices, and a shared reality bias, is to not only further coloniality via epistemic injustice but also circumvent and short circuit epistemological accountability, growth and potential (Anderson, 2012; Andreotti et al 2015; Amar, 2018). Hence, decolonial technologies of epistemic interface ought to think with and from within pre-colonial or anti-imperial ways of knowing and disengage [9]from the imposed obligation to see and understand the world from within the hubris of an ‘alleged unmarked universal neutrality (Mignolo, 2013, p278).
José Saldivar has suggested that de-colonial thinking is the “pluri-versal epistemology of the future; an epistemology that de-links from the tyranny of abstract universals (Christians, liberals, or Marxists).” (Mignolo et al 2013, 284) Crucial to this epistemic shift, as Saldivar notes in Unsettling Race, Coloniality and Caste, is the refusal to essentialize identity through the reversal of such enunciative foci [10]and the embrace of geopolitical and spatial implications for those whose experience and identities have been fractured by the borders of coloniality and all its binary castes. Drawing on both W. E. B. Du Bois and Gloria Anzaldua, Saldivar explains how the work of these author’s recodifies ethnoracial subjectivities to hold the tensions; the “warring ideals” of “inherent US linguistic wars” (or for Du Bois, white Americanism) “both inside the body of the nation and in the body of [the] soul”, so that new cultural formations might emerge (2007, p351-352).
Specifically, Saldivar is interested in Anzaldua’s insistence on the centrality of nepantilism, as a subalternist vernacular that resists borders, binaries, and castes, a “serpent” dialect “capable of cracking, fracturing, and braiding the very authority of the master’s English-only tongue.” (2007, p353) Significant to Anzaldua’s perspective is the way she understands nepantilism as the threshold between identities; for Anzaldua the multiple axis of experience privy to being a chicano, queer, feminist, woman. The vantage point offered by nepantilism it can be said, is explicitly emergent from Anzaldua’s struggle with colonial gender binarism[11] in and through her chicano identity.
Though Anzaldua’s theory of nepantilism is expanded upon and revised in her later work to be both liminal space and embodied spirit (as explained and drawn on in other sections), the braided and threaded-throughness of its vernacular manifests through performance, as a means of resisting binary systems of knowledge production. In short, it takes the entangled nature of knowledge and identity as the fluid state with which we begin in the world; but also the transformative space with which we can engage and rewrite our selves. Nepantilism is not a closed world, but rather an openness to totality and change that supports the manifestation of nonbinary modes of being, privy to the shape shifting demands of concepts like justice, dignity, and diversity inclusive, or interculturalidad worlds.
Decolonial technologies of epistemic interface ought to queer identity/knowledge in such a way that resists essentialist representations and universal epistemic positions. They should be fundamentally concerned with the performance and embodiment of epistemic (and as such ontologic) transitions; with occupying the space between becoming accountable to what we must leave behind to pursue just and dignity centered futures, and sensing the world anew through the embrace of messy, uncontainable and interrelational threadedness of trans/ontological difference. This means engaging in imaginative methods committed to nonbinary, pre-colonial or anti-imperial thinking and doing as critical project, as well as, more fundamentally, a shift toward love as ethics, and identity/knowledge as performative entanglement. Hence, to decolonize interface as epistemic, this project turns to the embodied demands of quantum physics, gender, precolonial ways of knowing, and fiction and poetics as method.
NOTES:
[1] “The eighteenth century (or more exactly, the period between approximately 1760 and 1800 was dominated by two distinctive shifts. First, there was the displacement of power in the Atlantic circuit from the south to the north. Second, the main concern in Europe, from the Peace of Westphalia (1648) until the end of the eighteenth century, was nation-state building rather than colonialism.17England, France, and Germany were not yet colonial powers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and when they be-came so, they mutually reinforced nation building with colonial expansion, particularly starting in the nineteenth century. However, the strong pre-occupation in the north with the Europe of nations placed colonialism on the back burner, so to speak. Colonialism was a secondary concern for nations such as England and France, whose presence in the Americas was geared toward commerce rather than conversion, like the project of Spain and Portugal. At that point, France and England did not have a civilizing mission to accomplish in the Americas, as they would have in Asia and Africa after the Napoleonic era. Current conceptualizations of modernity and postmodernity are historically grounded in that period. The second stage of modernity was part of the German restitution of the Greek legacy as the foundation of Western civilization” (Mignolo, 2000, p61)
[2] To quote Fanon, in Black Skin White Masks: “The disaster of the man of color lies in the fact that he was enslaved. The disaster and the inhumanity of the white man lie in the fact that somewhere he has killed man. And even today they subsist, to organize this dehumanization rationally.” (1986 p.231)
[3] “Following Fanon, I will use a concept that refers to the colonial subject, equivalent in some way to Dasein but
marking the aspects of the coloniality of Being: the damne´ or condemned of the earth. The damne´ is for the coloniality of Being what Dasein is for fundamental ontology, but, as it were, in reverse. The Damne´ is for European Dasein the being who is ‘not there’. I want to argue that they are not independent of each
other but that, without awareness of coloniality, reflection on Dasein and Being involve the erasure of the damne´ and the coloniality of Being” (Maldanado-Torres, 2007 p253) Maldanado-Torres also asserts: “The damne´ is the subject that emerges in a world marked by the coloniality of Being. The damne´, as Fanon put it, has nonontological resistance in the eyes of the dominant group. The damne´ is either invisible or excessively visible. The damne´ exists in the mode of not-being there, which hints at the nearness of death, at the company of death. The damne´ is a concrete being but it is also a transcendental concept. Emile Benveniste has shown that the term damne´ is etymologically related to the concept of donner, which means, to give. The damne´ is literally the subject who cannot give because what he or she has has been taken from him or her.” (ibid 258)
[4] As eluded to above, this non ethics can and should be read through the lens of ethical forgetfulness and selectiveness, whereby supremacy and lordship, indeed explicitly white supremacy and lordship, dictate the parameters of ethics and the dehumanization of being. Damne is used by Franz Fanon and Maldanado-Torres here to articulate the subject that emerges from this process, those implicated by the non-ethics of war; the violent absence and silenced, conquered peoples; specifically Black and indigenous peoples; women, of no being (Maldanado-Torres, 2007, p. 257-260).
[5] Where the life instinct or life energy in question for this work should be understood as one of receptivity, creativity, and giving; indeed love, in its most honest forms and truth bearing forms.
[6] “The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation. “(Fanon, 1986 p.60)
[7] As with concepts such as Dependency Theory or World-system analysis, emergent from the social sciences. That as Mignolo notes, “in the politics of their loci of enunciation”, impose and extend differential imperial rule as praxis and can be understood as, “the difference between center and periphery, between the Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism and knowledge production by those who participated in building the modern/colonial world and those who have been left out of the discussion. Las Casas defended the Indians, but the Indians did not participate in the discussions about their rights. The emerging capitalists benefiting from the industrial revolution were eager to end slavery that supported plantation owners and slaveholders. Black Africans and American Indians were not taken into account when knowledge and social organization were at stake. They, Africans and American Indians, were considered patient, living organisms to be told, not to be heard.” (2000, p63)
[8] Specifically here with regards to the fact that Women, Black, Indigenous, Asian and Latino people, as Jose Saldivar has pointed out in Mignolo and elsewhere, “are not just a social phenomenon that shall be studied from the perspective of the social sciences modeled from the perspective of White Europeans and US scholars” and under a certain “universal pretension of an epistemology founded, [as Quijano observes], on the experience of one particular ethnicity, white euro-americans” (2013, p269)
[9] In recent years, shifts in university approaches in the Andean region of South America have show what epistemic decolonisation, thinking with and within pre- or anti-imperial or otherwise marginalized epistemologies, might look like indigenous run educational initiatives and interculturalidad educational components (Amar, 2018).
[10] To study white European world-making, from within the colonial crack.
[11] Gender dynamics have been from the beginning, fundamental and crucial to fortifying and upholding imperial regimes and the coloniality of power (Shiwy, 2007 p275). Freya Shiwy has drawn attention to how gender and, “[t]he construction of subjectivity is the third dimension of the coloniality of power” (ibid p 274). And while the invention of race as a technology of the conqueror has been highly important marker for the coloniality of power and contributed significantly to the reign of imperial power and unjust governance over subjectivities, as Shiwy details, gender imaginaries have not received the same degree of attention: “The construction of racial subjectivity has served as a bodily metaphor for ordering economic, political as well as epistemic relations, while at the same time creating lived exclusions and abuses as well as forms of organized and quotidian resistance and subversion. Yet, constructs of masculinity and femininity, relations between women and men as well as those who do not fit smoothly into these binary categories have been crucial to all of these dimensions.” (ibid 274-275) Hence, coloniality and imperial differential rule cannot be completely comprehended or contended with in the absence of a theory of gender as Shiwy writes: “[w]hen discussions of the coloniality of power abstract from gender, they risk re-inscribing foundational elements of the coloniality of power where gender binaries and gender imaginaries have been naturalized[11]” she goes on: “[t]he colonial imaginary has employed gender as a metaphor and means of subalternization, a metaphor that resulted not only in the representation of territories as female virgin lands that the conquerors penetrated with the sword in hand. The gendering of colonial imaginaries has operated as a means of rendering European masculinity through Othering.” (ibid 275)