Other Latino Poetic Method

Glasnik Etnografskog instituta, 2015

In this paper J. M. Coetzee's novel Waiting for the Barbarians is seen as fundamentally disrupting the binary logic that underpins colonial discourse. The binary constructs an image of the civilized, rational and good, and the primitive, irrational and evil on the opposite sides of a fixed border. In this novel, as well as in colonial reality, the binary dissolves into ambivalence, overlap and often complete inversion of the two opposed constructed identities. This paper analyses the novel Waiting for the Barbarians identifying as the most important themes-the ambivalence and inversion of colonial identity, which are seen as a reflex of the fear of the indigenous other. The analysis focuses on the motifs of vision and surveillance in the novel, and Lacan's psychoanalytic notions of the gaze and the scopic drive. It is observed that these concepts figure prominently in the narrative by establishing ambivalent psychological relationships of power between the main characters, discovering ambivalence within the characters and the inversion of their constructed colonial identities. 'And if thou gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee'. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil Colonial ideology rests on the clear boundary separating the Empire and wilderness, the civilized and uncivilized space. In this worldview the rule of reason and civility stretches until the farthest outpost of the Empire, where from the watchtowers guardians of reason wage their constant fight of separating the fragile realm of civilization from its barbaric other. The binary logic of imperialism is crucial for the establishment of the relation of dominance, accommodating "such fundamental binary impulses within imperialism as the impulse to exploit and the impulse to civilize" (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 1998, 24). In one of the most influential works of postcolonial theory, Orientalism, Said showed how systematic discursive crea

Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 2020

Journal of Commonwealth & Postcolonial Studies, 2018

During the 1990s, various disciplinary debates took place within Latin Americanist circles regarding whether Latin America indeed falls under the category of the postcolonial. Many argue that Latin America, being a former Spanish colony, has, ultimately, very little in common with the conditions and legacies of colonization as elaborated by British and French postcolonial critics and theorists. These discussions went on for years, and in many ways have never ceased. As a result of these rather unresolved debates Latin America never fully obtained critically as a site of postcolonial inquiry. Instead, the field came to see what is now known as decolonial theory, and not postcolonial thought, emerge over the past twenty years as an increasingly prominent analytic approach for the study of Latin America's colonial legacies. Defined in opposition to postcolonialism, which many Latin Americanist critics found to be still too imbedded within the Western critical tradition, "Decoloniality" or the "decolonial option" came to serve as the name for a theoretico-political paradigm promoting indigenous, aboriginal, or other previously colonized and relegated modes of knowledge as a means to challenge Western Reason's claim to universality. Walter Mignolo differentiates between the two in the following way, "decolonial thinking is differentiated from postcolonial theory or postcolonial studies in that the genealogy of these are located in French post-structuralism more than in the dense history of planetary decolonial thinking ("Epistemic Disobedience" 46). While this distinction is carried out somewhat tautologically, the point made is that while postcolonial theory continues to rely heavily on certain strands of post-structural thought, decoloniality claims not to. Through concepts such as border thinking, delinking (Walter Mignolo), transm odernity (Enrique Dussel), and the coloniality of pow er (Anibal Quijano) decoloniality positions itself as a uniquely non-eurocentric critical tradition that diverges from and aims to surpass other prominent theoretical models such as Marxism, deconstruction, as well as postcolonial theory itself. Within various fields and disciplines, ranging from literary and cultural studies to history and anthropology, the decolonial option has become established as a methodological platform and has been heralded by some as a revolutionary paradigm for the cultural and political emancipation of formerly colonized cultures from western modes of knowledge and power.

2018

The theory of ‘the Other’ serves the role of justification in writing about neo-imperialisms. That is to say, if neo-imperialisms writing is concerned with the colonial expansion of European, American and Japanese powers for the sake of capitalism, then the theory of ‘the Other’ is what enables the expansion. The relevance of such a relationship, where “relevance” can be understood as significance or merit, would be unveiling to the reader the triviality of the concept to begin with. The vast applicability of the theory of ‘the Other’, coupled with its ever-changing subject throughout neo imperalisms writings, undermines its legitimacy. Consequently, Warren Cariou’s short story ‘An Athabasca story’, Evelyn Reilly’s poem ‘A Key to the Families of Thermoplastics’ and Jeff Vandermeer’s novel Annihiliation will be looked at to trace the Other in order to explore its ever-changing nature. This inconsistency of the Other, or shape-shifting, rather, proves to show the concept’s ability to be manipulated and used for self-interest, reinforcing human nature’s selfish tendencies. All three texts make light of this through manipulating the theory within their work; the essay will first elaborate on the theory, and then apply it to Cariou’s to Reilly’s to Vandermeer’s work, in order of growing triviality of the Other.

Radical Philosophy Review, 2006

Journal of Institute of Postcolonial Studies, Routledge., 2016

2010

What some see as the ongoing collapse of English as a discrete discipline has been hastened along by postcolonial studies, but many have argued that this deconstruction has been true from the start, that literary studies in general "has speculated continually about the intellectual foundations within which its key questions are framed and which make it possible, and how things might be otherwise" (Moran 46). Robert Miklitsch for example, suggests that "literature . . . was once implicitly interdisciplinary, encompassing, as Hazlitt indicates, science as well as philosophy" (Miklitsch et al. 258). Nonetheless, writes David Glover, "whatever criteria one uses to identify the literary, it is clear that in recent years its semiotic destinations have become ever more uncertain. Enter cultural studies, stage left" (Miklitsch et al. 284). On cue, David Lloyd argues that "cultural studies represents the fulfillment rather than the displacement of literary ...