Son[i]a #448
Javier García Fernández
Javier García Fernández (b. 1987, El Ejido) is a historian, a researcher and a critical thinker focused on Andalusia. His work is situated in southern Europe, in a troubled, borderland space outside of (and against) the grand imperial narratives. Javier does not approach history as a closed archive, but as a contested field from which to think about the construction of our ways of seeing, naming, and inhabiting the world. His research reclaims stories that have been silenced and opens up cracks through which to imagine other possible futures, at a time marked by the decline of the last empire of the West.
In this podcast, Javier García Fernández uses the three dimensions of coloniality – the coloniality of knowledge, of power, and of being – to think about what it might mean to decolonise Spain and Europe from its margins. He has coined the concept of pensar jondo – a kind of thinking that draws on flamenco cante jondo or ‘deep song’, on the social struggles of rural Andalusia and the anarchism of day labourers, and on the diasporas to Catalonia and Europe – to interpret Andalusia as a laboratory of the internal coloniality of the Spanish state: a land marked by dispossession, forced migration and fascist violence, but also by radical forms of community, cooperation and resistance. From that point, he considers how to develop political alliances that can tackle the rise of fascism today.
With the support
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
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