The World Turned on its Head: Coloniality, Civility and the Decolonial Imperative (original) (raw)

The World Turned on its Head: Coloniality, Civility and the Decolonial Imperative

In this Keynote Address from the 2015 Annual Meeting of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies, I historicize and problematize the concept and uses of civility when considered within a constellation of other associated concepts. Civility is not an abstract absolute concept that has only one available meaning. Given the context of an overarching coloniality of language and communication in which our discourses operate, too often we reproduce and reify that which we claim to be challenging. As such, civility also produces particular conceptions of incivility that can challenge, but can also serve to reinforce the problematic and often taken for granted idea of civility as tied inextricably to a colonial project. Instead, I propose a re-reading of the concepts of civility and incivility that explodes the limits of our understanding of both towards a distinct decolonial horizon that attempts to evade the logic of coloniality, which has restricted our ways of thinking the two concepts outside of a reinforcing of colonial power. I take serious the question, inspired by the Zapatistas, “Is another civility possible?