User:Aitantv/Rolando Vázquez (2021) Vistas of Modernity

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Decoloniality & Aesthetics

  • "morphology of the white gaze" (p3)
  • "How the interactions between modernity and coloniality is not reducible to the separation between visible and the invisible, in that it implies the entwinement and disjuncture between the enjoyment of the sovereign self and the suffering of others" (p3-4)
  • "no metropolis without the colony...no modernity without coloniality" (p5)
  • "Are we historically implicated in the suffering of others?" (p5)
  • "While modernity names the historical affirmation, the taking place of the western project of civilization, coloniality names the historical negation, the displacement, the eviction of other worlds of meaning." (p6)

+ Is that all modernity/colonialism is? Do we need a more balanced, less didactic view?

+ Are we in a sense also exoticising other cultures, countries, leaders, states, and evincing them of any repsonsibility for colonialism? It's not only a European problem but this essay focuses on the European responsibility using primarily the Eiffel tour as evidence for how representation becames the very experience of reality. Representation > perception.

  • "Decolonial artistic practices are mobilizing non-eurocentric cultural archives, embodied experiences and memories that have been under erasure." (p9)
  • "modernity is characterized by the dominance of vision" (p23