Avaliação: Miradas decoloniales sobre América Latina y El Caribe – Lacunae, Encounters, and New Horizons: Locating Abya Yala in Resistance (Working Title)

Latin America is, in itself, a convoluted spatial modernity. Nearly two decades since the ascendance of the protosocialist governments, collectively referred to as the Pink Tide, various regions of Latin America are facing an ongoing governmental crisis. Beyond the narrative of pendulum politics, swinging between progressive and reactionary forces, other alternative ways of being not only exist but are actively resisting through their cultivation of other worlds. These practices, observable through astute critical lenses like those used in the accompaniment of the Uruguayan journalist Raul Zibechi, manifest in particular undercurrents of historical resistance.

How can decolonial frames allow us to see through what cultural theorist Macarena Gomez-Barris calls the “epistemic murk?” How far can the deconstruction of modernity take us and what can Latin American undercurrents of resistance tell us about the variegated societies percolating below? Presenting the first chapter of my dissertation, I put forth an intersectional, transdisciplinary framework within the emerging dialogical plane of critical analysis coming out of Latin America. My central analytical focus starts by pulling out Abya Yala as a complex site housing countermodernities and narratives of resistance. Borrowing from Secwepemc leader George Manuel’s conceptualization, Abya Yala is read as a fourth world, a site of struggle driven by a relational ontology inextricably linked to land and colonial encounters. Looking primarily at anti-extractivist protest in Peru, I argue that certain forms of protest form part of unique geopolitical undercurrents driven by radical traditions in the Andes. Here I deploy various analytical concepts such as refusal from cross-hemispheric relational hermeneutics. In doing so, I situate resistance to anti-extractivism alongside underlying currents that make up the paradigm of Abya Yala across seemingly distinct localities.

• Abya Yala
• Autonomía
• Extractivismo
• Hermeneutics
• Resistance