This film should have been a choice text for me; I love post-apocalyptic stories that end badly. But the heaps of critical praise the film has garnered don’t even seem to notice it as a dystopia. “This movie is a … Continue reading “Beasts of the Southern Wild – The Romance of Precarity II”
Lauren Berlant’s most recent book, Cruel Optimism (Duke UP, 2011), undertakes the ambitious and necessary project of thinking the political present. Cruel Optimism attends closely to what goes undernoticed about living in relation to waning or worn-out models of legibility, sovereignty and sustainability. This dossier assembles … Continue reading “Cruel Optimism: New Social Text Periscope Dossier”
Click here to read. On the one year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, Social Text is pleased to debut “Is This What Democracy Looks Like?” a collection of original essays on horizontalism in theory and practice. Written and edited by faculty and graduate … Continue reading “Social Text Periscope on OWS”
Work Reviewed: Holland, Sharon Patricia. The Erotic Life of Racism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2012. xii + 168 pp. Then she touched me, and then I did stop dead. […] I do not know. I know only that my entire … Continue reading “The Touch of Flesh with Flesh”
I This dossier is one more step of the journey that began toward the end of 2009/beginning of 2010, and that already has roads planned into the future. The idea of this dossier, however, emerged in Middelburg, The Netherlands, … Continue reading “Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings”
In this dossier we look at the geopolitics of sensing, knowing and believing that have been at play in the variegated versions of the project decolonial aestheSis. The participants are intellectuals, curators and artist and many of them all at … Continue reading “The Decolonial AestheSis Dossier”
In locales where the resources are scarce and the imperial-colonial configurations more complicated than in the West-East or North-South dichotomies, the politics of physical survival and the politics of servility towards the criminal state unfortunately dominate. There are no recipes … Continue reading “The Observatory of the Bereaved: Unbinding the Imaginary in Eurasian Borderlands”
Three years ago, in the summer of 2010 I began a series of projects for Documenta 13 as part of the artists’ initiative called AND AND AND. On the one hand, these contributions focused on my Phantom Limbs and Twin … Continue reading “Propositions for a Decolonial Aesthetics and "Five Decolonial Days in Kassel" (Documenta 13 AND AND AND)”
The conceptualization of decolonial aesthetics[i] is fairly recent, however its points of departure — the epistemic shifts that have been challenging coloniality in the artistic and cultural practices of the Global South — are as old as the colonial … Continue reading “Black Europe Body Politics: Towards an Afropean Decolonial Aesthetics”
The postcommunist transition has been characterized in Eastern Europe by the return and rearticulation of capitalism and coloniality in this region of the world. Seen from Eastern Europe, the postcommunist transition can be understood as the top-to-bottom integration of East … Continue reading “Decolonial AestheSis in Eastern Europe: Potential Paths of Liberation”
Introduction by Walter Mignolo Tanja Ostojić? And what is decolonially aestheSis in her work? Simply, Tanja’s work unveils the logic of coloniality through the intersectionality of the European Union’s politics of migration, gender, and sexuality. When Rolando and I invited … Continue reading “Crossing Borders / Development of Diverse Artistic Strategies”
The Panama Canal, completed in 1914, creates a borderland of North and South. The nation of Panamá was invented by it, a consequence of centuries of Spanish occupation and US imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The canal initiated … Continue reading “Flow”
The Biennial Statement The written curatorial statement from the organizing committee of the 11th Havana Biennial arrived via email the same day that we were preparing a dossier for the Romanian magazine IDEA. As we put together a brief … Continue reading “Decolonial AestheSis at the 11th Havana Biennial”
