The Spacing of Decolonial Aesthetics
Main Article Content
Abstract
This essay develops on the aesthetic dimensions of decolonial thought in the work of Rodolfo Kusch and Enrique Dussel, who both point us to non-objectifying modes of thinking and being. Beyond a strictly epistemological approach, decolonial critique ought to offer an account of bodies, spaces, and movements that are the very condition of thought—that is to say, the condition of a mode of thinking otherwise, beyond the dominant colonial paradigm. This account of aesthetics involves the spacing and temporalizing of bodies as they live and move through the world, or what Alejandro Vallega calls living-thinking. The spacing-temporalizing of life points us also to the rhythm of life—life as movement, flow, and spacing. Turning to resistant epistemologies alongside the work of Omar Rivera, I consider how these epistemologies go beyond disembodied and abstracted ways of knowing as they sidestep the subject/object divide and engage sensuous and embodied dimensions of thinking, aesthetic experiences, diverse geographies, and histories. In closing, I argue that decolonial aesthetics also points us to a critique of the coloniality of space. Moving beyond a cartographic grid that attempts to capture subjects and spaces in advance on its coordinate plane, decolonial aesthetics opens onto the richness of embodied and cosmic spaces.
Article Details
JWP is an open access journal, using a Creative Commons license. Authors submitting an article for publication to JWP agree on the following terms:
- The Author grants and assigns to the Press the full and exclusive rights during the term of copyright to publish or cause others to publish the said Contribution in all forms, in all media, and in all languages throughout the world.
- In consideration of the rights granted above, the Press grants all users, without charge, the right to republish the Contribution in revised or unrevised form, in any language, and that it carries the appropriate copyright notice and standard form of scholarly acknowledgement as applicable under the CC-BY license.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.