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How to Disengage from the Coloniality of Perception

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Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art

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Abstract

The chapter offers a critique of the coloniality of perception as a form of dependence on dominant aesthetic assumptions. Exposing the neo-universalist and occidentalist nature of contemporary aesthetic models including N. Bourriaud’s ‘altermodernity’, Tlostanova juxtaposes aesthetics with aesthesis understood as a human ability to perceive the world through the senses, free from any imposed notions and norms. The chapter provides a decolonial view on such typical aesthetic issues as the correlation of the rational and emotional in art, the role of art in the production of knowledge and being, the importance of corporality as an immediate source and instrument of aesthesis, the reinterpretation of the beautiful. In focus is also the mechanism of the decolonial sublime and the ways of creating decolonial ‘communities of sense’.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There were already several important decolonial initiatives around the aesthetic sphere, including the Decolonial Aesthetics exhibition in Bogotá in 2010, followed by a collection of articles edited by Walter Mignolo and Pedro Pablo Gómez (2012) and the Decolonial AestheSis Dossier in Social Text: Periscope (2013) edited by Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vázquez.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

    Madina Tlostanova

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  1. Madina Tlostanova
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Tlostanova, M. (2017). How to Disengage from the Coloniality of Perception. In: Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48445-7_2

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