Decoloniality, communality, and anti-semitism

Although Latin American decolonial thinking has always maintained an interest in taking the theories and practices of the communities of Latin America’s colonized peoples seriously, the theorization of communality and communal systems has been a new focus of the last two decades. That is, the academ...

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Veröffentlicht in:Cultural dynamics 2020-11, Vol.32 (4), p.241-260
1. Verfasser: Woods, Maxwell
Format: Artikel
Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung:Although Latin American decolonial thinking has always maintained an interest in taking the theories and practices of the communities of Latin America’s colonized peoples seriously, the theorization of communality and communal systems has been a new focus of the last two decades. That is, the academic decolonial dedication to diversity and difference has recently been imagined as a pluriverse of communal systems. As such, this decolonial group of thinkers has been effectively demanding that the radical theories of communality produced by Indigenous communities of the Global South be taken seriously as real and viable alternatives to capitalism and representative democracy. Nevertheless, a critical engagement with Latin American decoloniality reveals a serious oversight in communal-oriented decoloniality: it fails to engage in a serious manner the millions throughout the world who are not or are perceived as not part of any community or are exiled from their community. To demonstrate this threat within the communal-oriented vision, one can look to another (de)colonial context ubiquitously overlooked in Latin American decolonial thought: Ireland. More precisely, as a reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses reveals, the communal-oriented Irish anti-colonialism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries contained a common mode of modern anti-Semitism: Jews belong to no community and uproot and hollow out the life of any community they encounter. This article argues that although the pluriversal vision of communal-oriented decoloniality is explicitly opposed to the denigration, dismissal, or rejection of any community, it can still be characterized by this other mode of othering: the denigration, villainization, and oppression of persons who are perceived as embodiments of anti-communality.
ISSN:0921-3740
1461-7048
DOI:10.1177/0921374019856631