Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Degree

Master of Arts

Program

Theory and Criticism

Supervisor

Joshua Schuster

Abstract

This thesis examines decolonization from the theoretical perspective put forth by Walter Mignolo and others as modernity/coloniality/decoloniality. It understands decoloniality to be a political-epistemic project grounded in the critique of colonial structures of violent domination as well as the autopoietic self-organization of autonomous communities. It argues that poetics as a creative relation of language to the social body is necessary in order to produce knowledge by thinking from and with these autonomous communities. Basing its examination of decolonization on the work of poets Aimé Césaire, Cecilia Vicuña and Beth Brant, this thesis shows how poetics forms a horizon in which the philosophical anthropology of the decolonial subject, the metacritique of reason in the space of the border, and an ethics of political liberation can ground new ways of instituting global concrete humanity.

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