Reinventing revolutions: an 'other' politics in practise and theory (original) (raw)

In order to be able to hear, see, and speak with/as the disposable non subjects of contemporary capitalism, one must “exceed its logic.” For critical scholars committed to such excess, this means stepping beyond the comfort and privilege found in clinging to long-held conceptual, methodological, and epistemological practices. It also means willingness to embrace as Lugones (2010, 746) describes, “a praxical task . . . [to] critique the racialized, colonial, and capitalist heterosexualist gender oppression as a lived transformation of the social. As such it places the theorist in the midst of the people in a historical, peopled, subjective/intersubjective understanding of the oppressing resisting relation at the intersection of the complex systems of oppression.” This chapter aims to contribute to this praxical task through an exploration of Walter Mignolo’s (2009, 4) call to “change the terms of the conversation” by politicizing the traditional division of labor between the knower and the known, and committing to experiment with and explore methodologies and pedagogies that reflect the postrepresentative politics that many of these movements are forging (see also Motta, 2013a). I specifically focus on the challenges this reinvention presents to twentieth-century political categories and conceptualizations of left alternatives, thematize and conceptualise key elements of these revolutionary practices, and offer some ways in which critical scholars might imagine an epistemological and methodological praxis—through the concept of prefigurative epistemologies (see Motta 2011a for an extended discussion of this concept) and the figure of the storyteller—that exceeds the logic of capitalist coloniality.