Showing posts with label Nelson Maldonado-Torres. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nelson Maldonado-Torres. Show all posts
Monday, 24 February 2014
Wednesday, 4 December 2013
Friday, 29 June 2012
Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity
Reviewed by Felipe Martínez-PinzónAgainst War: Views from the Underside of Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 360 pages. $84.95 cloth, $23.95 paper.
One of the most enduring images in Against War is from another book, Enrique Dussel’s The Invention of the Americas. It is of an event that happens in privacy, behind the scenes of History: Hernán Cortés learns from Moctezuma’s envoys that the indigenous inhabitants take him to be God. Alone, and then surrounded by his men, Cortés acknowledges the power bestowed on him by those very words that constitute him. This scene of solitude is also one in which unmistakable and egotistical grandeur works as self-fashioning. Even more so than for Dussel himself, it serves Maldonado-Torres as an occasion to reflect on the birth of modern subjectivity as a consciousness born out of the radical unevenness between the European and the native. Far from Spain, freed from the all-seeing gaze of the King, Cortés can truly believe himself to be God.
Thursday, 28 June 2012
Monday, 5 December 2011
Frantz Fanon and C.L.R James on Intellectualism and Enlightened Rationality
by Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Caribbean Studies, Vol. 33, No. 2. 2005
This essay explores critical accounts of modern rationality and efforts to articulate a conception of reason that is tied to the idea of decolonization as project. It focuses on the work of two of the most widely known and influential Caribbean theorists: the Martiniquean psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon and the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James.
This essay explores critical accounts of modern rationality and efforts to articulate a conception of reason that is tied to the idea of decolonization as project. It focuses on the work of two of the most widely known and influential Caribbean theorists: the Martiniquean psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon and the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James.
Saturday, 6 August 2011
The Cry of the Self as a Call from the Other: The Paradoxical Loving Subjectivity of Frantz Fanon
by Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Listening: Journal of Religion & Culture, 2001
Frantz Fanon has achieved the status of an icon in the academy. In contrast to the late 1960's and the early 1970's, today his books and essays tend to be more in the hands of what Kierkegaard disparagingly called “assistant professors” than in study groups of radical political movements. The moments appear long gone when people approached Fanon’s texts as a recipe for immediate political action. Now, with the academy taking for many the privileged locus of significant political activity, Fanon’s texts have moved from the ghettos into the classrooms. This move is not by itself a negative one, since, even though this has not been entirely the case so far, it invites Fanon’s readers to focus on his thought and ideas, and no longer to reduce his work to his biography or to a preconceived political agenda on his commentators’ parts. It also brings the opportunity to study the philosophical and political implications of what arguably constitutes one of the darkest sides of “our” ordinary existence—precisely the opposition between ghettos and classrooms.
Frantz Fanon has achieved the status of an icon in the academy. In contrast to the late 1960's and the early 1970's, today his books and essays tend to be more in the hands of what Kierkegaard disparagingly called “assistant professors” than in study groups of radical political movements. The moments appear long gone when people approached Fanon’s texts as a recipe for immediate political action. Now, with the academy taking for many the privileged locus of significant political activity, Fanon’s texts have moved from the ghettos into the classrooms. This move is not by itself a negative one, since, even though this has not been entirely the case so far, it invites Fanon’s readers to focus on his thought and ideas, and no longer to reduce his work to his biography or to a preconceived political agenda on his commentators’ parts. It also brings the opportunity to study the philosophical and political implications of what arguably constitutes one of the darkest sides of “our” ordinary existence—precisely the opposition between ghettos and classrooms.
Saturday, 23 July 2011
On the Coloniality of Being
by Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Cultural Studies, 2007
The concept of coloniality of Being emerged in discussions of a diverse group of scholars doing work on coloniality and decolonization. More particularly, we owe the idea to Walter D. Mignolo, who reflected on it in writing as early as 1995. I do not remember exactly when it was that I heard or read the term for the first time. I believe that it was in 2000 in a talk given by Mignolo at Boston College but I do know that since I heard it, it caught my attention in an unusual way. The reason was that when I heard it I had already spent some time working on the thought of Martin Heidegger and some of his critics who engaged his work from the perspective of questions related to race and the colonial experience. Heidegger, who is considered by many one of the two most original European philosophers of the twentieth century (the other being
Ludwig Wittgenstein), left an indelible mark in European philosophy by continuing Nietzsche’s frontal attack of modernity and epistemologically centered philosophy with an elaboration of what he referred to as fundamental ontology. Heidegger’s formulation of a new starting point for philosophy consisted in a rearticulation of the question of Being, which influenced many other intellectuals thereafter, the most notable perhaps being the French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida.
The concept of coloniality of Being emerged in discussions of a diverse group of scholars doing work on coloniality and decolonization. More particularly, we owe the idea to Walter D. Mignolo, who reflected on it in writing as early as 1995. I do not remember exactly when it was that I heard or read the term for the first time. I believe that it was in 2000 in a talk given by Mignolo at Boston College but I do know that since I heard it, it caught my attention in an unusual way. The reason was that when I heard it I had already spent some time working on the thought of Martin Heidegger and some of his critics who engaged his work from the perspective of questions related to race and the colonial experience. Heidegger, who is considered by many one of the two most original European philosophers of the twentieth century (the other being
Ludwig Wittgenstein), left an indelible mark in European philosophy by continuing Nietzsche’s frontal attack of modernity and epistemologically centered philosophy with an elaboration of what he referred to as fundamental ontology. Heidegger’s formulation of a new starting point for philosophy consisted in a rearticulation of the question of Being, which influenced many other intellectuals thereafter, the most notable perhaps being the French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida.
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