Arturo Escobar: Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (2008)

“In Territories of Difference, Arturo Escobar, author of the widely debated book Encountering Development, analyzes the politics of difference enacted by specific place-based ethnic and environmental movements in the context of neoliberal globalization. His analysis is based on his many years of engagement with a group of Afro-Colombian activists of Colombia’s Pacific rainforest region, the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN). Escobar offers a detailed ethnographic account of PCN’s visions, strategies, and practices, and he chronicles and analyzes the movement’s struggles for autonomy, territory, justice, and cultural recognition. Yet he also does much more. Consistently emphasizing the value of local activist knowledge for both understanding and social action and drawing on multiple strands of critical scholarship, Escobar proposes new ways for scholars and activists to examine and apprehend the momentous, complex processes engulfing regions such as the Colombian Pacific today.

Escobar illuminates many interrelated dynamics, including the Colombian government’s policies of development and pluralism that created conditions for the emergence of black and indigenous social movements and those movements’ efforts to steer the region in particular directions. He examines attempts by capitalists to appropriate the rainforest and extract resources, by developers to set the region on the path of modernist progress, and by biologists and others to defend this incredibly rich biodiversity “hot-spot” from the most predatory activities of capitalists and developers. He also looks at the attempts of academics, activists, and intellectuals to understand all of these complicated processes. Territories of Difference is Escobar’s effort to think with Afro-Colombian intellectual-activists who aim to move beyond the limits of Eurocentric paradigms as they confront the ravages of neoliberal globalization and seek to defend their place-based cultures and territories.”

Publisher Duke University Press, 2008
New Ecologies for the Twenty-first Century series, 1
ISBN 9780822343271, 0822343274
xvi+435 pages

Reviews: Laura Fano Morrissey (Development, 2009), Christopher L. Chiappari (Latin American Politics & Society, 2010), Pierre Hamel (American Journal of Sociology, 2010), Lilly U. Nguyen (Interactions, 2010), Rodrigo A. Lima de Medeiros & Guilherme F. W. Radomsky (Sociedade e Estado, 2010, BR-PT), Manuel J. Prieto (Revista de geografía Norte Grande, 2010, ES), Jeffrey S. Juris (American Anthropologist, 2011), Cornelia Butler Flora (J Agric Environ Ethics, 2011), Claudia Steiner (Americas, 2011), Paul Routledge, Juanita Sundberg, Marcus Power, & Arturo Escobar (Progress in Human Geography, 2012).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (5 MB)

BE.BOP: Black Europe Body Politics (2012-2018)

“Be.Bop: Black Europe Body Politics, a project of Art Labour Archives, is a decolonial transdisciplinary and indisciplinary curatorial initiative based in Berlin with an international impact through presentations in major cities across three continents.”

“Active in the international cultural arena since 1997, Art Labour Archives has been passionately involved in the production and theorization of performance and the moving image from a Black Diaspora perspective.

In the vision of its founder, Alanna Lockward, disciplines are meant to facilitate each other’s dismantling by means of constantly challenging its own claims to legitimacy. This paradigm inversion places collective knowledge creation as a central ambition. In this sense, the optic and praxis of Art Labour Archives is to surpass the expectations of the society of the spectacle and its insatiable appetite for visual and sensorial stimulation. Instead, the dozens of publications, exhibitions, screening programs, workshops and seminars conceptualized and produced by Art Labour Archives in the last seventeen years, have offered liberation, healing and redemption as a viable alternative.

In short: our journey is one of experiencing “art” as a labour of love and mutual examination and recognition beyond geographical, discursive and disciplinary thresholds. Between 2010—2018 Be.Bop has been presented in conferences, seminars and different public events in three different continents thanks to the support and faith of our partners, participants and friends.” be.bop=”” “is=”” an=”” enterprise=”” led=”” by=”” curator=”” alanna=”” lockward;=”” a=”” collective=”” of=”” artists,=”” curators,=”” artivists=”” and=”” activists,=”” social=”” theorists=”” humanists.=”” decolonial=”” project=”” healing,=”” learning=”” love.=”” network=”” with=”” the=”” middelburg=”” summer=”” school=”” aesthesis=”” in=”” bogota=”” durham=”” (duke=”” university)”=”” (walter=”” mignolo,=”” advisor).=”” curated=”” lockward=”” publisher=”” art=”” labour=”” archives,=”” berlin,=”” 2012-2018=”” Publisher

Catalogues:
The Skin Thing, 2012, event website
Decolonizing the “Cold” War, 2013, event website
Spiritual Revolutions & The “Scramble for Africa”, 2014, event website
Chronology, 2012-2015
Call & Response, 2016, event website (2)
Coalitions Facing White Innocence, 2018, event website

Walter D. Mignolo, Catherine E. Walsh: On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (2018)

“In On Decoloniality Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh explore the hidden forces of the colonial matrix of power, its origination, transformation, and current presence, while asking the crucial questions of decoloniality’s how, what, why, with whom, and what for. Interweaving theory-praxis with local histories and perspectives of struggle, they illustrate the conceptual and analytic dynamism of decolonial ways of living and thinking, as well as the creative force of resistance and re-existence. This book speaks to the urgency of these times, encourages delinkings from the colonial matrix of power and its ‘universals’ of Western modernity and global capitalism, and engages with arguments and struggles for dignity and life against death, destruction, and civilizational despair.”

Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, 2018
On Decoloniality series, 1
ISBN 9780822370949, 0822370948
xiii+291 pages

Reviews: Sara Castro-Klarén (MLN, 2019), Sneja Gunew (Postcolonial Text, 2019), Kirsten Mundt (Cultural Studies, 2019), Laura Maria de Vos (Transmotion, 2018), Joe Parker (Society+Space, 2020).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (4 MB, updated on 2020-1-26)