Son[i]a #197
Walter Mignolo
Walter Mignolo is an Argentine semiotician, and professor at the Center for Latin American Studies at Duke University.
His lines of work range from semiotics and literary theory to the history of the modern world and of colonisation. This latter subject is the focus of his most recent research, and explores concepts such as global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge and pluriversality. His latest publications include The Idea of Latin America, The Dark Side of Western Modernity, and a monograph entitled Epistemic Disobedience, which is a compilation of some of his latest articles.
SON[I]A talks to Walter Mignolo about the relation between the construction of history and the perspective of power, as imposed by the West. In this conversation, he also explores the ways in which art and museums have contributed to the construction of the colonial matrix, and the strategies that contemporary theory has come up with to influence this Westernised view of the museum as a centre of knowledge.
Anti-racism and anti-colonial resistance from the perspective of people of African descent
We talk to Karo Moret, Diego Falconí and Lucía Piedra Galarraga interculturality, multiculturality, and migrant sit-ins. They share ideas on cosmopolitics, the Hispanic world, atavisms, and Afrofuturism; on El Cid's beard, the Royal Spanish Academy, and taking academia to the street. They examine the ways in which a transvestite theory of childhood challenges the imaginaries embodied in literature and explore the legal loopholes and the counter-routes of knowledge that could allow us, collectively, to come together in the south.
Françoise Vergès
In this podcast, Françoise Vergès unpacks the social and environmental politics of cleaning and waste, charting and questioning temporal and spatial interactions that create a neutral site of deprivation, exhaustion and exploitation. She sheds light on the economy and politics of exhaustion, pointing out the role of racial capitalism in the climate crisis. Vergès suggests a political re-reading and understanding of vital needs and natural elements through notions of cleaning, hygiene and medicine, and raises revolutionary questions about the prefabricated assumptions of justice and social transformation through re-thinking the museum.
Anti-racism and anti-colonial resistance from the perspective of people of African descent
We talk to Diego Falconí Travez, Lucía Piedra Galarraga and Karo Moret about slavery and love, the Caribbeanization of identities, and violence as a potential resource. They discuss affects, phobias, autophagies, and unsettling objects. And they examine the Latino world in relation to the mask of gay culture, coming out of the closet as a liberal promise, and resent(i)ment as a circular form that prevents memory from disappearing.
Nora Sternfeld
Nora Sternfeld problematises the educational turn and talks about the crisis of the museum model, radical pedagogy, emancipatory practices and alliances, para-institutions, unlearning strategies and collective knowledge projected into the future.
Anti-racism and anti-colonial resistance from the perspective of people of African descent
We talk with Lucía Piedra Galarraga, Diego Falconí Travez and Karo Moret from the Study Group on Afro/Black Ideas, Practices, and Activisms about altars, ekekos, nefandos, Saint Barbara, and Valdivia's Siamese twins. They turn their attention to the politics of hair, talk about sugar as the star product plying the Caribbean routes, and acknowledge the usefulness of ashes in proving the extermination of the ancient Andean sodomite communities.