Decolonial Discourses and Practices: Geopolitical Contexts, Intellectual Genealogies, and Situated Pedagogies

Abstract

Although decolonial thought from Latin America and the Caribbean is a multifaceted field of research and sociopolitical praxis, it is often interpreted monolithically. To refuse this tendency, we argue that it is imperative to trace decolonial theory’s intellectual genealogies and engage in transgressive decolonial hermeneutics to re-interpret texts (theories) according to their living socio-historical and geopolitical contexts. Following Stuart Hall’s lead, we first sketch out the geopolitical and sociocultural exigencies that allow for theoretical movements to unfold, paying more attention to the geopolitical implications of thinking “from” Latin America and the Caribbean. Second, we address the ethical imperative of thinking “with” as we seriously engage in inter-epistemic dialogues to advance an ecology of decolonial knowledges and pedagogical practices born in struggle. Ultimately, this article situates decolonial discourses and practices according to the conditions that enable their praxis-oriented intellectual expression.

Notes

1 Decolonial studies is not a coherent whole represented by a handful of scholars. It is also not complete or fixed in time and space since it is being advanced in different geographies with their own intellectual genealogies (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2021). Decolonial thought and praxis, in other words, is dynamic and heterogeneously configured. As Davis rightly points out, the critiques against decolonial thought establish a fabricated unity that “overstates drastically the institutional influence of a set of questions that is still marginalized as ‘not real philosophy’ in the U.S. academy, which is still dominated by analytic philosophy” (p. 21). As decolonial thought and praxis is always already in the process of becoming something other within varying contexts, struggles, and histories, we draw on the work that is situated and politically committed.

2 As Mariátegui expressed: “Art needs to be nourished by the sap of a tradition, of a history, of a people. And in Peru, literature has not sprung from the tradition of history, of the Indigenous people. It was born of the importation of Spanish literature; it was nourished later by imitating the same literature. A sickly umbilical cord has kept it united with the metropolis” (p. 215).

3 Mariátegui advanced the idea of border epistemologies and the transculturation that emerges within the contact zones without having to use these concepts: “Garcilaso, above all, is a solitary figure in the literature of the Colony. In Garcilaso two ages, two cultures join hands. But Garcilaso is more Inca than conquistador, more Quechua than Spanish. He is also a case of exception. And in this lies precisely his individuality and his greatness” (p. 211). Challenging the positivist, evolutionary, diffusionist, deterministic, and Eurocentric perspectives of his time delimiting what constituted a national literature, Mariátegui expressed that “The nation [and literature] itself is an abstraction, an allegory, a myth, which does not correspond to a constant and precise, scientifically determinable reality” (p. 210).

4 Pedagogics thus becomes another branch of the philosophy of liberation that complements ethics as well as aesthetics, axiology, ontology, and epistemology. Since it moves away from the subjective and toward the intersubjective, it unsettles modern/colonial notions of the individual. Pedagogics thus unsettles individualist notions of currere as it underscores intersubjectivity and the collective dimensions of learning within and beyond schools. That which is conceived as pedagogical aligns well with what Freire aimed to reveal through his notion of conscientizaçao, which was always already a collective process situated in struggle.

5 Analectics is about praxis and not merely theoretical. It is an existential commitment to resist the negation of the Other in one’s world.

6 The “anti” here is an active militant stance rather than a reactionary position against pedagogy (Dei, 2005). It can be conceived as an anticolonial and decolonial pedagogics of liberation.