Rolando Vázquez

Modernity Coloniality and Visibility: The Politics of Time

This paper presents the problem of the mediation between modernity and coloniality; and it explores the usefulness of the question of time to address this mediation. How can we think the simulation of modernity together with the oblivion of coloniality? The text brings the critique of time to the centre of the modernity/ coloniality debate. It shows that chronology, chronological narratives are at the heart of the modern/ colonial systems of oppression; and that the movements of resistance against ‘hegemonic globalization’ are not only questioning the material structures of oppression, but also the universality of the modern idea of time. It is an invitation to think about the politics of time that are at play in modernity/ coloniality. Here, the modernity/ coloniality tandem is seen as the institution of a politics of time that is geared towards the production of specific economic and political practices oriented to sever the oppressed from their past, their memory. The ensuing temporal discrimination makes invisible all that does not belong to modern temporality. Under this light, it is possible to see how the practices of resistance to the modernity/ coloniality project embody a different politics of time, one that rescues memory as a site of struggle, one that involves the possibility of inhabiting and rescuing the past. These practices of resistance are thus seen as fights against temporal discrimination: fights against invisibility. By addressing the imposition of modern time we can better understand the widespread injustice and violence of modernity/ coloniality. Furthermore, the question of time can help us to bridge the gap between the simulacra of modernity and the oblivion of coloniality.

The Coloniality of Gender as a Radical Critique of Developmentalism

Co-writing this piece has meant our putting into words the deeply personal, painful and fruitful process that has meant engaging with the ideas of Maria Lugones — an ongoing process in which our subjectivities are shifting and some kind of joint perspective emerges from the vestiges of what is left in each of us as products of gender-specific developmentalist policies in Latin America. This pain allows us to feel/think/sense the coloniality of Eurocentric social sciences and of some feminisms (Icaza 2013a, 2013b). In this text, we co-construct an engagement from this troubled and ongoing process to think together about coloniality through a critical reconsideration of ‘gender’. We will show how ‘gender’ is an analytical category that has been widely used and misused in development discourses and interventions during the last three decades (Icaza and Vazquez 2013).

Precedence, Earth and the Anthropocene: Decolonizing design

AbstractDesign came to name modernitys way of worlding the world. What is at stake in decolonizing design is our relation to earth, and the dignifying of relational worlds. The task of decolonizing design brings us to a three-folded path: to understand modernity´s way of worlding the world as artifice, as earthlessness, to understand coloniality´s way of un-worlding the world, of annihilating relational worlds and, to think the decolonial as a form of radical hope for an ethical life with earth.At a more fundamental level, the mode of precedence is introduced to challenge modernity´s metaphysics of presence and its reduction of experience to empty time. The question of precedence delinks from westerns philosophy grounding dichotomy between immanence and transcendence. The mode of precedence brings to the fore a temporal relationality that is always already ahead of any formation in the field of immanence, in the surface of the present.Can we think of relational design as a decolonial form of being with ...

PRECEDENCE, TRANS* AND THE DECOLONIAL

Abstract These words are a collaborative effort to think across different practices of knowing and sensing. They don’t pretend to compose a complete article. They are simply an assemblage that wants to open spaces for dwelling, for connecting, for dissenting. As such it gravitates around the images of Daniel Brittany Chávez’s performance: “Quisieron Enterrarnos … ” (2014), his artist statement and Rolando’s notes on precedence, trans* and the decolonial. In this conversation, we are allies and accomplices in thinking through trans* as a prefix both of non-binary transgender identity (Daniel B. Chávez’s artist and subject position) and from Rolando Vázquez’s conceptions of trans* from decolonial thought at praxis. In conversation, we offer this assemblage not from a space of tension but from a space of mutually nurturing decolonial praxis.

Commodity Display and the Phantasmagoria of Modernity: Exploring Walter Benjamin’s Critique of History

We have grown used to the overwhelming presence of images formed by the media industry. These images are part and parcel of our daily life. They configure clusters of meaning, visual narratives through which our identities and our very notions of the real are negotiated. The commodity largely shapes our visual environment. The lines that follow open the question of commoditization of the visual.