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Accepted Paper:
(Un) doing Decolonial Anthropology
Decentering, de-Westernization and epistemological insurgency
Diego Ballestero
(Universität Bonn)
Decolonization has become a diluted metaphor, co-opted by Anglo-Saxon academia. This presentation aims to decentralize and de-Westernize the epistemological monopoly of the Anglo-Saxon academy, fostering inter-epistemic dialogue and multidimensional struggle.
Paper Abstract:
More than a decade ago, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang pointed out that decolonization was becoming a metaphor. In retrospect, this admonition has not only materialized, but reached new dimensions of metaphorical dilution. Decolonial thought has been largely co-opted by Anglo-Saxon academia. Depoliticized and devoid of its condition of transformative practice arising in contexts of struggle, it became a theoretical, standardized and fashionable discourse in Anthropology. Diluted of any radical intention of anti-colonial critique, it has been subsumed into the very structures of power it was meant to deconstruct. In the Western economic politics of knowledge we observe a marked unidirectional gaze from the North to the South, privileging an epistemic monologue that excludes voices and perspectives coming from the Global South.
To counteract this tendency, this presentation discusses from an anti/countercolonial perspective the political and epistemological positionality of the decolonial perspective "popularized" by the Anglo-Saxon academy. From voices of activist intellectuals from Abya Yala, it seeks to contribute with elements for the decentralization and de-Westernization of the epistemological oligopoly of the Anglo-Saxon academy. At the same time, it aims to cooperate with the creation of a multi-collective space for reflection and inter-epistemic dialogue and, at the same time, multidimensional struggle.