-Eugenie Brinkema, How I Have Not Written Certain of My Readings

gramsci cited in spivak's aesthetic education

-Eugenie Brinkema, How I Have Not Written Certain of My Readings

There is no cleansing that can be done. Instead, these are paradoxes and contradictions that we have to recognize that we inhabit and then figure out a practical, ethical approach to that inhabitation. That will allow us to actually practice our difference from Heidegger rather than assert it as if it were an identity. We have to work that and play that as a practice. Only under very specific circumstances would I use the term decolonial, and it really is only to refer to a set of practices which I think now can properly be called that way. I also use it to refer to a sort of attitude that is present, at least in my understanding, in scholarly circles. Primarily, I think it shows up as a moral claim that can easily devolve into a kind of moralism. It accompanies a kind of scrutiny that is imposed on people, so you can see whether or not they are properly decolonial, you know? It is puritanical in that way. Even the prefix “de-” implies the possibility of an absolute cleansing. I am not saying that every decolonial thinker believes that there can be some absolute eradication of coloniality, but it produces that general moralistic atmosphere. So, I prefer the term anti-colonial, which to me implies a more or less interminable commitment to fight colonialism. But I am older. The thinkers that I was brought up with, raised to admire, and want to affiliate with, they were anti-colonial thinkers. They were involved in anti-colonial practices. What we know now about the history of so-called postcoloniality is that it did not on any level create a situation in which anti-coloniality was no longer needed. Anti-coloniality is needed now, more than ever before.” -Fred Moten, in interview

We have to learn how to desire something more than that. And it is terrible, right? How do you learn how to desire something more than being a human, something more than being a person, something other than being a fully-fledged individual subject, something other than being represented? How does an artist come to desire something other than being at this museum? [Points to the surroundings.] Or how does a black scholar desire something other, or more, than being a professor at Harvard, or Yale, or NYU? Like I said, I don’t absolve myself from these questions. They are the questions of my life. I have no pure position from which to articulate these questions. That is the whole point. I am implicated in every one of these questions.” -Fred Moten, in interview