Work · Latin American & Caribbean Philosophy
Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: On Decolonising Practices and Discourses
Decolonisation must be practised, not only theorised – with a sharp critique of the decolonial theory of the North American academy.
Introduction
The essay was published in 2010 by the Argentine press Tinta Limón; an English version appeared in The South Atlantic Quarterly in 2012. Its central image is the Aymara word ch’ixi, a grey made of tiny black and white dots, which Rivera Cusicanqui uses for a society in which indigenous and European elements coexist and contend without merging into a harmonious mixture. On this basis she rejects both the national ideology of mestizaje and the official multiculturalism of the 1990s, which confined indigenous people to a folkloric past, and insists that decolonisation must be practised in language, work and everyday life. She accuses North American decolonial theorists, naming Walter Mignolo, of turning the ideas of Andean thinkers into academic capital without acknowledging them.
Connections
Criticizes
- Local Histories/Global Designs2000 · Walter Mignolo
More works by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui
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