Son[i]a #451
Rolando Vázquez Melken
There is no modernity without coloniality. As decolonial thinker Rolando Vázquez Melken tells us, modernity did not just usher in a particular historical era on the Western timeline. It set a whole machinery in motion: a matrix of power that organises the world, distributing the visible and invisible, the audible and silenced. From this perspective, coloniality is not just a remnant of the past, but a wound that still operates in the form of violence, extractivism, and erasure. Decolonial thought does not respond to this open wound by designing a new world, or proposing a new utopia. As Rolando understands it, decoloniality begins elsewhere: in detaching ourselves and in a pedagogy of listening.
Decolonial listening is not a passive gesture. It is a destabilising practice. While modernity has been sustained by its ability to represent, classify, articulate, and project futures, decolonial listening makes us turn towards other ethics: of receiving, embracing, and care. Of acknowledging our position, undoing universalism, opening up to interdependence. It is a kind of listening that is attentive to pluriversality: to a world where many worlds can coexist, where difference is one of the conditions that make it possible, rather than a threat.
In this podcast, we go into listening mode with Rolando Vázquez Melken. He proposes countering the modern-colonial aesthetic—the one that organises representation and governs our bodies and our gazes—by liberating aesthesis, or reopening the field of the sensible. The idea is to make space for other ways of seeing, listening, feeling, and living. To make room for ancestral knowledge and forms that have been historically erased, subordinated, or appropriated by the modern regime. Here, decolonial thought operates as a practice, a battlefield, an approach that walks alongside other forms of struggle and rings out in many voices: both ancestral voices and the voices that are still forging a path in the present, such as those of Walter Mignolo, María Lugones, Enrique Dussel, Gloria Wekker, and Catherine Walsh, to name just a few.
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