(De)Coloniality's Material and Symbolic Entanglements
Entangled Signs and Stones
The special issue I co-edited recently includes articles written by activist intellectuals who think with and work alongside social and territorial movements (feminist, anti-racist, Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous. Black, campesino, etc.). Whether it’s the Landless Workers’ Movement, Zapatistas, or Mapuche resistance, the authors position themselves as politically committed intellectuals who refuse to do research on movements. Intersecting the ethical with the political, they do research with distinct yet overlapping sites of struggle. Thus, they engage in decolonial thought and praxis that takes as their theoretical point of departure the material (power: political-economic, ecological, and territorial) and symbolic (knowledge: subjectivity, culture, education, pedagogy) entanglements of (de)coloniality.
Rather than emphasizing one dimension at the expense of the other, Peña-Pincheira and Allweiss advance what they refer to as inter-epistemic hemispheric engagements that unsettle the epistemic and political siloing of academic work. They use the terms sign and stone to conceptualize how the symbolic (sign) is inseparable from settler colonialism’s material destruction and violent dispossession (stone). By advancing counter-pedagogies of cruelty, the authors provide a framework for mapping and understanding pedagogy beyond school borders. They attend to the ways borders and the gratuitous nature of modern/colonial violences permeate schools and classrooms and the urgency of these disruptions. Here, counter-pedagogies of cruely become spaces of encounter that confront material and epistemological entanglements in violence. A decolonial and abolitionist feminist orientation refuses the colonial academic processes of knowledge extraction and disembodiment from social movements, and instead, insists that education scholars and practitioners align our work with them (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2010).
Barbosa also makes evident that knowledge and power form part of the pedagogical imperative to invalidate alternative ways of knowing and organizing power collectively (Quijano referred to this as the socialization of power). Going beyond critique, she illustrates how educational spaces created by campesino and Indigenous communities are not only used to reclaim knowledges but are also co-constructing knowledges that are praxis-oriented. The educational spaces emerging within these communities are thus always politically and thus materially implicated. As Freire taught us long ago, the political and pedagogical are inseparable and are all about praxis. As Tuhiwai Smith (2012) also observes, The colonizer did not simply design an education system. They designed an education especially to destroy Indigenous cultures, value systems and appearance (p. 22).
Following this line of thinking, Muñoz, Lira, and Loncón point to the difficulties of navigating higher education institutions in which Indigenous knowledges and subversive modes of doing research are sidelined because they depart from “scientific” modes of producing research. In their article, they collectively produce knowledge at the margins of academia. They critique the racist and settler colonial discourses justifying the displacement of Mapuche communities. It is worth quoting them at length to understand how they articulate racism, colonialism, education, and displacement: Racism is the structure on which systematic discrimination is sustained. Colonialism is a multiple eradication process. The eradication of land through occupation, erasing language, knowledge and culture through education and identity through shame, selfhatred and contempt for others. What happened and continues to happen in Traigu en and in Wallmapu cannot be understood as separate from what happens when schools teach about the Mapuche as people that existed in the past. Or from how Mapuche are only shown as terrorists by mass media and the colonizers as victims. This is the education of colonial culture where the Mapuche are in the space of nonbeing, while Chileans, settlers, and the State are the space of being. In the middle, there is a dividing line that is violent and which, violates rights, makes people invisible, and denies the Mapuche humanity. As can be observed, the pedagogical imperative of settler colonialism is the annihilation of Indigenous peoples both at the material and symbolic levels. We all know that when coloniality’s sign begins to lose its persuasive powers, the stone is always ready to be effectively used by the State to “pacify” resistance.
Sorzano suggests that the mass protests and collective action in Colombia depended on artistic spaces in which multiple forms of solidarity could be expressed. Circus performance, for instance, becomes pedagogical and political insofar as their aim is to teach us how to enact and embody solidarity while engaged in collective action. Circus performances, like many other artistic demonstrations, were accompanied by ollas comunitarias that provided food and resources for artists. In the context of the strike and the pandemic, community pots acquired a significant role in providing food to millions of under-nourished people. Dorado (2020) describes the practice as “a symbol of unity, collective and collaborative work, a sign of solidarity and reciprocity, a sign of mutual help and care….These notions and practices are linked to the philosophies of Buen Vivir and Ubuntu, which are also grounded on principles of solidarity, reciprocity, and sharing. Buen Vivir is the umbrella term that encompasses Amerindian philosophies focused on the good life in a broad sense (Gudynas, 2011). It embraces a notion of well-being that is only possible within a community, connoting the fullness of life in communal living. Once again, cultural and artistic expressions from below are linked to the political.
What we can learn from these contributions is that sociopolitical contexts create the conditions of possibility to think and do otherwise (praxis). They teach us how to think from particular contexts and with multiple sites of struggle. If we reflect upon the shifting geopolitical landscape of Latin America and the Caribbean, it is important to pay close attention to how distinct sites of struggle continue to create alternative educational-pedagogical spaces in which thought and reflection informs collective action. This is what praxis looks like when the dominated and exploited reclaim their role as historical subjects willing to enact their agency to build a world otherwise.
We know that within a modern/colonial patriarchal capitalist world there are no guarantees. Nonetheless, let us never forget that ongoing social and territorial movements teach us that collective resistance and re-existence within the ruins of colonialism, racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy are two sides of the same decolonial coin—i.e., the material and symbolic are deeply entangled.
If our work is to modestly contribute to these struggles, asking the following questions may serve as a good starting point: How do we engage in ethical dialogue with others in such a way that we avoid reinforcing coloniality? How do we work alongside concrete sites of struggles while refusing to reproduce that which we are trying to unsettle? How do we use politically situated concepts and interpretive frameworks without engaging in "theory looting", epistemic racism, and epistemic extractivism? How do I position myself as a rearguard thinker rather than the vanguard? What is the role of pedagogy in this type of work?