Blog

The Blog

Blogging came to me; I did not look for it. It was a logical consequence of World and Knowledges Otherwise (WKO), a web dossier linked to the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities (CGSH. The CGSH offers an avenue to engage in sustained projects and conversations connecting research and teaching in the academy on global issues and in cooperation with similar institutions around the world (so far, mainly in Europe and South America). WKO is part of the overall projects of CGSH. It is a web-dossier, something in between an electronic and a regular academic journal. It has the flexibility in distribution that a regular journal doesn't have (e.g., it is expensive to send copies by mail beyond the US) and also a great flexibility in the material we can publish and organize around a given topic.

While engaged in those two activities, talking with my daughter Andrea and more or less at the same time with my colleague, at Duke, Claudia Milian, I saw in blogging another avenue to express and give way to ideas that come to me that do not find their way in articles or books; ideas that go after a class or seminar or after lectures and workshops I deliver or attend; after some thing I read or heard on the radio or watched on TV. It was indeed a conjunction between my interest in writing op-eds and blogging. Writing op-eds taught me how to express a single idea in fewer words and in a non-academic language. Bloging allows me to write op-eds freely without thinking whether it will be published somewhere or not. I know it will be in my blog. If someone else wants to publish it, fine; if not, fine too. The blog also allows me to pass information about events, to post some of my articles in Spanish or English, and to have a place in which I can articulate my thoughts on modernity, coloniality, decoloniality (decolonial thinking and the decolonial option), pluriversality, border thinking; briefly, to maintain an ongoing conversation about ideas that take to long to come about in books or printed articles.

But, mainly and above all, I like the idea of blogging (which I will do more after I finish a manuscript and several articles (I am writing this late Fall of 2007) because you can overcome the “police” that, in academia, control and decide what shall be published and what shall not. For many Indigenous intellectuals in all the Americas, video allows them to overcome the literacy control imposed by the State: making video allows them to claim their right to knowledge and to overcome the ”epistemic and political policing” that the State, through their controlled education, has imposed upon them. Bloging for me offers a similar opportunity that is offered to all whose ideas do not fit the taste and the political agendas of those who have been placed in policing (e.g., managing) positions to decide about degrees of excelence and levels of relevance.