Category: news

Paul B. Preciado

En el caso del devenir-Catalunya-libre, o bien la independencia es el objetivo final de un trámite político que tiende a la fijación de una identidad nacional, a la cristalización de un mapa del poder, o por el contrario se trata de un proceso de experimentación social y subjetiva que implica la puesta en cuestión de todas las identidades normativas (nacionales, de clase, género, sexuales, territoriales, lingüísticas, raciales, de diferencia corporal o cognitiva…).

O bien la masculinidad, la feminidad, la nación, las fronteras, las demarcaciones territoriales y lingüísticas… prevalecen sobre la infinitud de series posibles de relaciones establecidas y por establecer o bien fabricamos juntos el entusiasmo experimental capaz de sostener un proceso constituyente permanentemente abierto.

by Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang

Our goal in this article is to remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization. Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or, “decolonize student thinking”, turns decolonization into a metaphor. As important as their goals may be, social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches that decenter settler perspectives have objectives that may be incommensurable with decolonization. Because settler colonialism is built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires of white, non-white, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism. The metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or “settler moves to innocence”, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity. In this article, we analyze multiple settler moves towards innocence in order to forward “an ethic of incommensurability” that recognizes what is distinct and what is sovereign for project(s) of decolonization in relation to human and civil rights based social justice projects. We also point to unsettling themes within transnational/Third World decolonizations, abolition, and critical space-place pedagogies, which challenge the coalescence of social justice endeavors, making room for more meaningful potential alliances.