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Of birds and trees: rethinking decoloniality through unsettlement as a pluriversal human condition
Linköping University, Department of Thematic Studies, The Department of Gender Studies. Linköping University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
2020 (English)In: ECHO: Rivista Interdisciplinare di Comunicazione, E-ISSN 2704-8659, Vol. 2, p. 16-27Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Unsettlement is our current shared pluriversal human condition. We experience it differently depending on our trajectories, privileges and disadvantages. What we all share is the sense of ultimate defuturing. The negative phase of globalization coming to its apex, threatens to fold the world into a digital slavery in which coloniality would finally stop to be seen as a problem of refugees, migrants and indigenous people or a fashionable term of the academic elite, to be faced directly by each and every. The Covid-19 crisis has acted as an epitome of this tendency. Previously decoloniality has focused mainly on the critique of the intersections of race and capitalism in the production of knowledge and subjectivities, with a clear focus on the past. It has seldom addressed the future or ventured outside the position of the colonial difference (exteriority). In the face of the global challenges such as defunct politics and the ultra-right populist turn, the Anthropocene and technological colonization, the ongoing fragmenting of the human species, coloniality needs to be complemented with additional dimensions that would allow overcoming its stand-pointism and potentially unproductive refusal to dialogue across the imperial difference with other critical positions. One of such dimensions is unsettlement which is discussed in the article as a promising concept in the agenda for refuturing. It aims at transcending academic thinking to go in the direction of agency and bottom-up activism (political, social and artistic). In the last decade unsettlement has turned into a leitmotif of life in crisis per se manifested on the ontological, existential, affective and material levels of increasingly precarious lives of even those who seemingly stay in place thus bursting the modern/colonial binary of a rooted citizen versus an unsettled outlaw. With the Covid-19 crisis we have all become unsettled and brought to face the crisis of legitimacy of evacuated politics, of the nation-state, of international unions, institutions and bodies that have nothing to offer except a looming permanent state of exception and farmacopornographic control. Can the pluriversal unsettlement generate new transversal relational solidarity beyond the bankrupt institutions and power structures? Can it launch new communities of change which would inevitably also change us as humans? How would art and fiction react to these tectonic shifts and advance the shaping of the agendas of these communities of change? The article briefly addresses two possible paths for artistic representations of the unsettlement – the introspective one struggling with multiple identifications and re-weaving oneself and one’s world anew (exemplified by Hayv Kahraman’s works), and a less realized though promising way of the positive ontological design fictions and utopias/dystopias transcending modernity/coloniality to imagine an alternative other world (as manifested in a recent Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas exhibition). The unsettled birds rather than rooted trees are likely to be the main protagonists of these fictions and of the communities of change, helping us to learn that unsettlement can eventually bring a positive sense of the self and/in the world and a new political imagination to refuturing.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Bari: Universita degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro , 2020. Vol. 2, p. 16-27
Keywords [en]
unsettlement; pluriversality; defuturing; decoloniality; coalitions
National Category
Other Humanities
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-171779DOI: 10.15162/2612-6583/1205OAI: oai:DiVA.org:liu-171779DiVA, id: diva2:1506913
Available from: 2020-12-04 Created: 2020-12-04 Last updated: 2021-09-24

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Tlostanova, Madina

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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
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