Abstract:Jessica Elkayam asks Mariana Ortega about the influence both Latina feminisms and Martin Heidegger have had on the development of Ortega's mestiza theory.

The aim of this essay is to analyze the notion of “loving, knowing ignorance,” a type of “arrogant perception” that produces ignorance about women of color and their work at the same time that it proclaims to have both knowledge about and loving perception toward them. The first part discusses Marilyn Frye's accounts of “arrogant” as well as of “loving” perception and presents an explanation of “loving, knowing ignorance.” The second part discusses the work of Audre Lorde, Elizabeth Spelman, and (...) María Lugones in their attempts to deal with the issue of arrogant perception within feminism, and examines how Lugones's notion of “‘world’-traveling” may help us deal with “loving, knowing ignorance.” Ultimately, the author suggests that we need to become aware of instances of “loving, knowing ignorance,” especially if we are to stay true to Third Wave feminism's commitment to diversity. (shrink)

: The aim of this essay is to analyze the notion of "loving, knowing ignorance," a type of "arrogant perception" that produces ignorance about women of color and their work at the same time that it proclaims to have both knowledge about and loving perception toward them. The first part discusses Marilyn Frye's accounts of "arrogant" as well as of "loving" perception and presents an explanation of "loving, knowing ignorance." The second part discusses the work of Audre Lorde, Elizabeth Spelman, (...) and María Lugones in their attempts to deal with the issue of arrogant perception within feminism, and examines how Lugones's notion of "'world'-traveling" may help us deal with "loving, knowing ignorance." Ultimately, the author suggests that we need to become aware of instances of "loving, knowing ignorance," especially if we are to stay true to Third Wave feminism's commitment to diversity. (shrink)

A fenomenologia encontra-se em um momento crítico, enquanto investigadores reinterpretam textos canônicos e reverenciados de Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger e Maurice Merleau-Ponty para tentar demonstrar sua importância política e ética. Mais especificamente, os fenomenólogos desejam demonstrar a relevância da fenomenologia para as análises críticas das diversas identidades sociais. Devido aos compromissos metodológicos com o método transcendental, uma predileção por evidências apodíticas, o apelo para a suspensão da atitude natural e a busca por categorias ontológicas gerais, os investigadores contemporâneos não reconheceram (...) imediatamente a fenomenologia como uma fonte provável para teorizar as estruturas históricas e contingentes. Talvez o problema seja que a própria Filosofia em si, como observa Helen Ngo (2019), tem “uma tendência bem conhecida em direção à abstração e à conceitualização que pode dificultar o reconhecimento da natureza profundamente histórica e da especificidade situada do racismo” (p. 207; grifo nosso). De fato, a descrição de Ngo sobre o “acerto de contas” da raça pela Filosofia é muito apropriada; a Filosofia precisa confrontar suas práticas de omissão e supressão ou, em resumo, seu racismo. Certamente, uma filosofia como a fenomenologia, que leva a sério a experiência vivida e o mundo da vida, precisa teorizar a raça como uma característica fundamental da experiência vivida e da criação de sentidos. Não fazer isso indicaria um profundo fracasso em se envolver com o famoso “problema da linha de cor” que W. E. B. Du Bois (1989) entendeu tão agudamente como o principal problema do século XX, mas que claramente continua a nos assombrar. (shrink)

Draws from Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory to explore the concept of selfhood. This original study intertwining Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory offers a new philosophical approach to understanding selfhood and identity. Focusing on writings by Gloría Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Linda Martín Alcoff, Mariana Ortega articulates a phenomenology that introduces a conception of selfhood as both multiple and singular. Her Latina feminist phenomenological approach can account for identities belonging simultaneously to different worlds, including (...) immigrants, exiles, and inhabitants of borderlands. Ortega’s project forges new directions not only in Latina feminist thinking on such issues as borders, mestizaje, marginality, resistance, and identity politics, but also connects this analysis to the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and to such concepts as being-in-the-world, authenticity, and intersubjectivity. The pairing of the personal and the political in Ortega’s work is illustrative of the primacy of lived experience in the development of theoretical understandings of who we are. In addition to bringing to light central metaphysical issues regarding the temporality and continuity of the self, Ortega models a practice of philosophy that draws from work in other disciplines and that recognizes the important contributions of Latina feminists and other theorists of color to philosophical pursuits. Mariana Ortega is Professor of Philosophy at John Carroll University and coeditor (with Linda Martín Alcoff) of Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader, also published by SUNY Press. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to carry out an analysis of the multi-voiced, multi-cultural self discussed by Latina feminists in light of a Heideggerian phenomenological account of persons or "Existential Analytic." In so doing, it (a) points out similarities as well as differences between the Heideggerian description of the self and Latina feminists' phenomenological accounts of self, and (b) critically assesses María Lugones's important notion of "world-traveling." In the end, the essay defends the view of a "multiplicitous" self which (...) takes insights from Lugones's view of the self that "travels 'worlds'" and from other Latina feminists' accounts of self as well as from Martin Heidegger's account of Dasein. (shrink)

This original study intertwining Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory offers a new philosophical approach to understanding selfhood and identity. Focusing on writings by Gloría Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Linda Martín Alcoff, Mariana Ortega articulates a phenomenology that introduces a conception of selfhood as both multiple and singular. Her Latina feminist phenomenological approach can account for identities belonging simultaneously to different worlds, including immigrants, exiles, and inhabitants of borderlands. Ortega’s project forges new directions not only in (...) Latina feminist thinking on such issues as borders, mestizaje, marginality, resistance, and identity politics, but also connects this analysis to the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and to such concepts as being-in-the-world, authenticity, and intersubjectivity. The pairing of the personal and the political in Ortega’s work is illustrative of the primacy of lived experience in the development of theoretical understandings of who we are. In addition to bringing to light central metaphysical issues regarding the temporality and continuity of the self, Ortega models a practice of philosophy that draws from work in other disciplines and that recognizes the important contributions of Latina feminists and other theorists of color to philosophical pursuits. (shrink)

It matters that we learn to walk our brave decolonizing talks. … Coalitions that are productive are based on principled associations of mutual understanding and respect, not just declarations of solidarity that mean well but because of privileges of class, "race" or ethnicity, gender, and sexuality do not engage the work of transforming such subjectivity.Silences, when heard, become the negotiating spaces for the decolonizing subject.In this article I reflect about "decolonial woes"—not the misfortunes and distress that are associated with expressions (...) such as "woe is me" but a kind of affliction that is inherent in resistant academic practices that despite their being resistant, even radical and transformative, are... (shrink)

This article calls for an examination of the spectral operations of the perceptual architecture of colonization in conjunction with the enactment of a decolonial feminism as proposed by María Lugones. The first section discusses both the notion of ghostly subjectivity from Lugones's early work as well as the echoes of this notion in her recent work on the coloniality of gender that emphasizes the gender/race/sex nexus. Subsequently, through a photographic example, the article presents an analysis of the perceptual operations of (...) specter‐making in practices of colonization in light of Lugones's understanding of the “light” and “dark” sides of the coloniality of gender. This analysis highlights not only the intricate nexus between racialization and gender and sex norms both in the past and in the present context, but it also points to the necessity for of a decolonial feminism attuned to perceptual practices or a decolonial aesthesis. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to carry out an analysis of the multi-voiced, multi-cultural self discussed by Latina feminists in light of a Heideggerian phenomenological account of persons or "Existential Analytic." In so doing, it points out similarities as well as differences between the Heideggerian description of the self and Latina feminists' phenomenological accounts of self, and critically assesses María Lugones's important notion of "world-traveling." In the end, the essay defends the view of a "multiplicitous" self which takes insights (...) from Lugones's view of the self that "travels 'worlds'" and from other Latina feminists' accounts of self as well as from Martin Heidegger's account of Dasein. (shrink)

Existential space is lived space, space permeated by our raced, gendered selves. It is representative of our very existence. The purpose of this essay is to explore the intersection between this lived space and art by analyzing the work of the Cuban‐born artist Ana Mendieta and showing how her Siluetas Series discloses a space of exile. The first section discusses existential spatiality as explained by the phenomenologists Heidegger and Watsuji and as represented in Mendieta's Siluetas. The second section analyzes the (...) space of exile as a space of in‐between‐ness and borders. Lastly, the third section discusses temporality as it relates to the space of exile. Through the analysis of Mendieta's Siluetas, and in light of phenomenological accounts of space and the works of Anzaldúa and Mignolo, Ana Mendieta herself is disclosed as well as the space characteristic of those who can no longer be said to have a “home.” My exploration through my art of the relationship between myself and nature has been a clear result of my having been torn from my homeland during my adolescence. The making of my Silueta in nature keeps (makes) the transition between my homeland and my new home. It is a way of reclaiming my roots and becoming one with nature. Although the culture in which I live is part of me, my roots and cultural identity are a result of my Cuban heritage.1 As quoted in Gloria Moure, Ana Mendieta (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, S.A., 1996), 108. Ana MendietaLiving in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create.2 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands La Frontera, The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 73. Gloria Anzaldúa. (shrink)

Heideggerian existential phenomenology remains largely ignored by Latin American feminists due to their preference for more Marxist and Sartrean philosophies. But its influence on Latin American feminism can be felt through the work of thinkers such as Beauvoir and Irigaray, who have had a great impact on Latin American feminists’ involvement in political movements and developmentof theories. The aim of this essay is to discuss ways in which Latin American and U.S. Latina feminists have been influenced by phenomenology’s commitment to (...) lived experience, but have yet to embrace existential phenomenology in an explicit manner. (shrink)

How does everyday, inauthentic Dasein dominated by das Man become authentic? The aim of this article is to answer this and other questions about Dasein's authenticity by carrying out an analysis of the 'call of conscience'. This analysis, in turn, provides insights about Dasein's possibility for ethical existence. We will see that even though there are some puzzling issues in Heidegger's explanation of Dasein in its everydayness and its authenticity, the Heideggerian Existential Analytic is not 'anti-ethical' as some have claimed. (...) We will also see that the Existential Analytic's commitment to the ontic raises doubts about Heidegger's claim that the Analytic is prior to any ethics and examine how reading Being and Time as a project of 'metontology' may dissolve these doubts. Finally, the paper offers a suggestion about the importance of 'authentic historicality' in a factical account of the moral life. (shrink)

What is the norm of Americanness today, how has it changed, and how pluralistic is it in reality? from the Introduction In this volume philosophers and social ...

The following paper discusses Latina feminist debates on selfhood and identity. Since work by Latina feminists is not widely recognized or studied within the discipline of philosophy, the aim of the first section of this paper is to provide a brief introduction to Chicana feminism as it has been and continues to be pivotal in the development of Latina feminism. Included in this section is an introduction to the work of celebrated Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa who has played a major (...) influence in the theories of selfhood and identity developed by Latina feminists discussed in this paper. The second section analyzes the work of key contemporary Latina philosophers and theorists and shows the manner in which these theorists are reclaiming the notion of experience. (shrink)

Informed by María Lugones’s understanding of the “logic of purity,” this essay analyzes the race for critical phenomenology. It suggests how Lugones’s analysis of such a logic may guide us in developing phenomenological analyses of complex social identities such as race. It also shows how traces of the logic of purity remain even in critical phenomenological analyses of race. Specifically, the essay analyzes the methodological call for a reduction of quasi-transcendental structures. Ultimately an attitude and practice of critical criticality and (...) a mode of critical impurity are suggested so as to avoid problematic traces of the logic of purity. Ultimately, the discussion reveals how Latina feminist theorizing stands to enhance critical phenomenology. (shrink)

The article presents a study that aims to bring together the image and the word or ways of knowing through the concept of words and their respective ways to see images. Accordingly, when words are put together, phenomenological insight has been followed which does justice to lived experiences. Moreover, the author stresses the idea of the punctum in words as a wound.

Heideggerian existential phenomenology remains largely ignored by Latin American feminists due to their preference for more Marxist and Sartrean philosophies. But its influence on Latin American feminism can be felt through the work of thinkers such as Beauvoir and Irigaray, who have had a great impact on Latin American feminists’ involvement in political movements and developmentof theories. The aim of this essay is to discuss ways in which Latin American and U.S. Latina feminists have been influenced by phenomenology’s commitment to (...) lived experience, but have yet to embrace existential phenomenology in an explicit manner. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to carry out an analysis of the multi-voiced, multi-cultural self discussed by Latina feminists in light of a Heideggerian phenomenological account of persons or “Existential Analytic.” In so doing, it points out similarities as well as differences between the Heideggerian description of the self and Latina feminists' phenomenological accounts of self, and critically assesses María Lugones's important notion of “world-traveling.” In the end, the essay defends the view of a “multiplicitous” self which takes insights (...) from Lugones's view of the self that “travels ‘worlds’” and from other Latina feminists' accounts of self as well as from Martin Heidegger's account of Dasein. (shrink)

Inspired by the Kristevan notion of abjection and her view of the corpse as the “most sickening of wastes,” I propose a notion of photographic incandescence—the affective and carnal possibility of a photograph to undo the self. I first discuss the notion of abjection and its relation to incandescence and explore how this incandescence is connected to Kristeva’s view of the corpse. Second, I discuss the notion of photographic incandescence in light of an analysis of Susan Meiselas’s photograph, Cuesta del (...) Plomo, and Roland Barthes’s notions of piercing and fulguration. Finally, I engage Gloria Anzaldúa’s practice of putting Coyolxauhqui together in its attempt to “re-member” the self through the act of creativity, an experience not without pain or the possibility of failure and unreconcilable carnal excess. (shrink)

This paper examines photographic representations of the racialized body, more specifically, photographic representation of Afro-Mexicans, a group that has been previously made invisible from Mexican national identity but that has reemerged as the “Third Root of Mexico.” The question guiding the discussion is whether such racialized bodies can be represented in such a way that does not perpetuate racist, colonialist desires and impulses. First, I analyze the indexical nature of photographs and its role in the indexicality of race. Second, I (...) discuss the problematic representation of Afro-Mexicans in the series Tierra Negra, by contemporary Mexican photographer Maya Goded. Last, I examine photographic representations of racialized bodies in light of contemporary U.S African American–Latino relations. (shrink)

This article discusses sorrow in terms of its resistant possibilities. It describes bodies of color as ontological sites of sorrow in the context of racism and xenophobia. This sorrow, however, does not condemn these bodies to hopelessness and erasure. Rather, it may constitute a rupture with a present that fails to acknowledge racist and xenophobic practices. In addition, it connects sorrow to the kind of melancholia that bodies of color experience given their being-in-worlds that consider them unwanted, unworthy, and disposable. (...) By way of photographic analysis, this article also presents the notion of aesthetic unsettlement in order to point to coalitional possibilities across experiences and histories of woundedness, melancholia, and sorrow. (shrink)

This volume brings together many prominent philosophical voices today focusing on issues of U. S. Latinx and Latin American identities and feminist theory. As such, the essays collected here highlight the varied and multidimensional aspects of gender, racial, cultural, and sexual questions impacting U.S. Latinx and Latin American communities today. The collection also highlights a number of important threads of analysis from fields as diverse as disability studies,aesthetics, literary theory, and pop culture studies.

This essay examines photographic representations of queer Latinidad. A longing to discover a photographic history of Latina lesbian desire prompts a discussion of queerness in the context of Latinx love, sexuality, and desire. By way of examples of photographic representations, queer Latinidad is presented as complex and capable of encompassing paradoxical but expansive, nondichotomous understandings of sexuality and of gender presentation. Such photographic representations also allow for disidentifications that introduce the possibility of desires that cut across races and racism. Following (...) Muñoz, queer Latinidad is ultimately connected to a sense of longing and melancholia that is resistant in the face of the various erasures of queer Latinidad, both in the context of queer theory and in the context of everydayness. (shrink)

The overall aim of this project is to provide an explanation of Dasein that takes into account both Dasein's social and individual characters as well as both Division I and II of Being and Time. Chapter 1 provides an exposition of the existentialia of Dasein which illustrate the difference between Heidegger's characterization of human beings as Dasein and the traditional Cartesian epistemic subject. Chapter 2 analyzes the roles of das Man and Mitsein, the existential structures that are key in explaining (...) Dasein's social character. Furthermore, this chapter provides an account of what the individual character of Dasein amounts to, given that Dasein is an entity that has both das Man and Mitsein as part of its existential make-up. Chapter 3 concentrates on the important notion of authenticity or what Heidegger calls resoluteness. It addresses Heidegger's puzzling claims that authentic Being-one's-Self is a modification of das Man and that the das Man self is an existentiell modification of the authentic self. Lastly, Chapter 4 studies the role that the notion of choice plays in Heidegger's existential analytic as well as the relationship that an authentic Dasein has to history. ;In conclusion, this work shows that recent interpretations which portray Dasein as a being that is primarily social and that is completely defined by the norms of its community do not do justice to the fact that Dasein has an individual character which is a key element in its ontological make-up as well as in its ontic involvements, more specifically, in the ways in which, as authentic, it can appropriate the history of its community. In the end, we are left with a picture in which Dasein cannot be seen as wholly dominated by its sociality or as completely individualistic, but as an entity whose existential structure involves a social as well as an individual character, both of which contribute to its being-in-the-world. (shrink)

The following essay examines visual representations of hurricane Katrina in popular media in order to show how photography continues to be enlisted in the production of the racial spectacle, the transformation of the plight of people of color into entertainment. The essay also analyzes how such a use of the visual serves to solidify the understanding of people of color by way of a black-white binary that does not do justice to current U.S. demographics. The essay provides a glimpse into (...) the intertwining between the visual and racial thinking. (shrink)

This essay is an introduction to the cluster on Latina feminism published in Hypatia (Spring 2016), Vo. 31 (2), which features essays on various areas of Latina feminisms as well as discussions on the intersection of Latina feminisms and the work of thinkers such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Simone de Beauvoir, Enrique Dussell, Immanuel Kant, Édouard Glissant, Walter Mignolo, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Contributors to the cluster include Stephanie Rivera Berruz, Cynthia M. Paccacerqua, Andrea J. Pitts, Monique Roelofs, Susan C. Méndez, Gabriela (...) Veronelli, and Elena Flores Ruiz. (shrink)

Inspired by Mariana Ortega's invitation to reflect on diverse iterations of intersectionality, this article focuses on María Lugones's engagements with two Black feminist concepts, namely, interlocking oppressions and intersectionality. It explores these concepts alongside Lugones's use of her own terms such as intermeshed, curdling, multiplicity, and fusion, in several paradigm shifting essays, specifically, “Purity, Impurity, and Separation”, “Tactical Strategies of the Street Walker”, “On Complex Communication”, “Heterosexism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System”, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism”, “Methodological Notes Toward (...) a Decolonial Feminism”, and “Radical Multiculturalism and Women of Color Feminisms”. It also underscores Ortega's important contributions bringing these Black and Latina feminist concepts together in philosophically productive ways—in a spirit of collaboration and coalition rather than zero-sum competition. (shrink)

This essay works on the role of trauma and forgetting in the subjective formations of the world-traveler and la nueva mestiza. I investigate how forgetting affects the resistant capacities of these figures. I argue throughout that the memory of the world-traveler is an opaque memory, which is unintelligible for the hegemonic demands of transparency, and which forms the silt upon which the resistant possibilities of the world-traveler rest. The first part elaborates María Lugones's conception of world-traveling in relation to Gloria (...) Anzaldúa's New Mestiza consciousness and Mariana Ortega's multiplicitous self. Here I draw attention to the role of opacity and forgetting in the ways in which one can inhabit a world. The second part develops the notions of trauma and haunting to establish the experiential memory of the world-traveler not as a traumatic rupture, but rather as a haunted memory that accompanies her travels. The last section turns to Édouard Glissant's notion of opacity as a resistant mechanism, which works not through the traumatic rupture of experience but rather through sedimentation of experience. (shrink)

Aesthetic evaluations of human bodies have important implications for moral recognition and for individuals’ access to social and material goods. Unfortunately, there is a widespread aesthetic disregard for non-white bodies. Aesthetic evaluations depend on the aesthetic properties we regard objects as having. And it is widely agreed that aesthetic properties are directly accessed in our experience of aesthetic objects. How, then, might we explain aesthetic evaluations that systematically favour features associated with white identity? Critical race philosophers, like Alia Al-Saji, (...) class='Hi'>Mariana Ortega, Paul C. Taylor, and George Yancy, argue that this is because the perception of racialized bodies is affected by the social structures in which they are appreciated. The aim of this paper is to propose how social structures can affect aesthetic perception. I argue that mental imagery acquired through the interaction with aesthetic phenomena structures the perception of non-aesthetic properties of bodies, so that aesthetic properties consistent with racist stereotypes are attributed to individuals. (shrink)

This article critiques Homi Bhabha's proposal that mimicry, as a transgressive performance of ambivalence, disrupts the colonial violence of the stereotype, and as such, generates emancipatory conditions for postcolonial subjects. I am critical of this naming of mimicry as enabling a possible liberation from colonial violence not only because it fails to address the loss of belonging that significantly marks the experience of being so violated, but also because it seems to intensify this loss in the hybridity and fragmentation that (...) it celebrates. Through the work of María Lugones and Mariana Ortega, I propose a reimagined sense of Sartrean bad faith as one that corrects for this failure. This account of bad faith—as subversive, anticolonial practice—legitimizes my longing for a stability made impossible by the violent ambivalence that pervades both the colonial and postcolonial condition. Lugones's accounts of multiplicity and ontological plurality, as well as Ortega's conception of hometactics, help me argue that this reimagined conception of bad faith ought to be considered productive when it comes to existential strategies that pursue the possibility of free black life. (shrink)

Unlike many theories of the self found in Western philosophy, Maria Lugones and Mariana Ortega argue that subjectivity is multiplicitous in ways that defy the either/or logic of colonial Western thought. They also center liminal subjects, take embodiment seriously, and position multiplicitous subjects as always already in the borderlands. Their accounts of multiplicity are grounded in their lived experiences. Nevertheless, Lugones and Ortega disagree on the ontological and existential statuses of the multiplicitous self. While Lugones defends ontological (...) pluralism and the discontinuity of experience that dissolves any unified "I," Ortega defends existential pluralism and the continuity of experience, retaining an... (shrink)

Aesthetic evaluations of human bodies have important implications for moral recognition and for individuals’ access to social and material goods. Unfortunately, there is a widespread aesthetic disregard for non-white bodies. Aesthetic evaluations depend on the aesthetic properties we regard objects as having. And it is widely agreed that aesthetic properties are directly accessed in our experience of aesthetic objects. How, then, might we explain aesthetic evaluations that systematically favour features associated with white identity? Critical race philosophers, like Alia Al-Saji, (...) class='Hi'>Mariana Ortega, Paul C. Taylor, and George Yancy, argue that this is because the perception of racialized bodies is affected by the social structures in which they are appreciated. The aim of this paper is to propose how social structures can affect aesthetic perception. I argue that mental imagery acquired through the interaction with aesthetic phenomena structures the perception of non-aesthetic properties of bodies, so that aesthetic properties consistent with racist stereotypes are attributed to individuals. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that scholars who reproduce photographs of Black people for subversive purposes should pursue alternative modes of re-exhibition other than carelessly reproducing said photographs as is. Christina Sharpe’s care-based method of wake work, performed within In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), is one such form of ethical exhibitorship. Care, in this text, is the pursuit of the full context of the afterlives of slavery against oppressive narratives about Black people and their lived experience to (...) reach a clearer level of understanding and engagement with people experiencing anti-Blackness. In section one, I will analyze Mariana Ortega and Saidiya Hartman’s engagements with photographic representation. In section two, I will explicate Sharpe’s account of the wake and wake work, emphasizing the role of care. In section three, I will explore the limitations of wake work, mainly the tension between wake-filled reproductions and careful discretion. (shrink)

I develop a connection between racial identity and Heidegger’s early phenomenological perspective from Being and Time. This effort offsets the critique that Heidegger is too abstract in his use of Dasein to have any practical application to racial identity. I examine how the underlying issue of racial identity is rooted in the composition of an “existentiell,” where one grows up in a variety of ways to be, compelling one to choose and neglect them. I then examine Mariana Ortega’s (...) critique of Heidegger’s idea and how she describes it as a limiting concept that is too abstract to deal with everyday issues of race. By recovering the concept of Dasein from the “abstraction critique” via re-imagining an existentiell, I show how everyday discourses about racial identity are part of the phenomenological world Dasein grows up in, necessitating analyses about how to be in the world through racial, ethnic, and cultural dimensions. (shrink)

This essay builds on a recent intervention made by Mariana Ortega, who has called on philosophers committed to decolonization to avoid reproducing “colonial impulses and erasures” in the very attempt to advance epistemic decolonization. When connected to “practices of un-knowing,” these tendencies become an “affliction,” which Ortega labels with the notion of “decolonial woes.” The author focuses on the reception of the spiritual elements in Anzaldúa’s work to identify a specifically secular form of a decolonial woe: the (...) disregard for the potential that spirituality comprises for advancing the project of decolonization. To counter such secularist erasure, this essay offers an interpretation of Anzaldúa’s well-known concept of la facultad as a postsecular methodology that can help advance the project of epistemic decolonization. (shrink)