Postcoloniality, Latin American Contexts and the Humanities. Situating and Territorializing Critical Thought

CATELLI, LAURA

Leiden

Conferencia; Decolonizing Western Political Philosophy Conference; 2022

Research Committee 31 in Political Philosophy of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) and Leiden University

In the wide frame drawn by the question about the crisis and possible directions for the Humanities in the current geopolitical situation, one of intense turmoil over territorial control and voracious extractivism and exploitation of resources, it is my intent to share a reflection on the the legacies that coloniality has engraved in epistemological and methodological dimensions of research and the production and circulation of knowledge. Even though I intend to concentrate on conceptual genealogies that engage critically, theoretically, and politically with colonialisms mostly from the past, I am also very concerned with other dynamics inherent to contemporary US imperialism, both in terms of Latin American regional and national scenarios within Latin America/Abya Yala/Nuestramefricaladina, and with regard to two interconnected realms: an institutional one, that includes dynamics of reception, production and circulation of theories about colonialism in the still compartmentalized disciplines of humanities; on the other, the reception, reelaboration and circulation of critical discourses on colonialism coming from hegemonic centers (mostly those produced in the global North). Latin American thought will work here as a contrasting background in order to tease out questions about who, how, from where, in what socio-political, economic, historical contexts, spatialities and relations, we engage with a diversity of materials or objects of inquiry. I am thinking about the genealogies of knowledge we deploy when engaging with diverse materials as we craft our critical interventions, or what domains we produce or reproduce in the process of manipulating the objects of our interrogations, how we work with them in what in cultural criticism we may call theoretical practice. Within this frame it is possible to engage in a debate about the social dimensions of problems in education, as questions about teaching in relation with research and critical production of knowledge comprise a relevant aspect of the reflection I am sharing here. It is my aim to make certain epistemological markers visible in order to revise the conditions under which knowledge is produced, circulated, extended, and branded as legitimate, to suggest that the ways in which our ways of reading (not just jaded, but situated and, I want to propose, territorial), make profound inflections on the way we pose and approach problems in our research, and the ways in which certain categories may actually limit or even block the experience of thinking about certain problems at all.