+++decolonial aesthesis and the end of the contemporary+++

+++Rolando Vázquez+++

Importantly for decolonial thought, we are all located in relation to the colonial difference that structures our modern/colonial order. It is only from an awareness of our positioned realities that we can enter into relation with each-other, that we can listen to each-other and learn from each-other.

About the author: Rolando Vázquez is Professor of Post/Decolonial Theories and Literatures, with a focus on the Global South at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam. Since 2010, he co-directs with Walter Mignolo the annual Maria Lugones Decolonial Summer School. He is advisor at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam and the TextielMuseum in Tilburg.

From the foreword by Gloria Wekker: 'Rolando teaches students, but really all of us, critical literacy with regard to images, TV, films, history, and everything that daily feeds and teaches us the content of what it means to be human, modern, an individual, which always already means being superior to animals, Earth and others of colour and taking distance from them, who is included and who is excluded from that dominant imagery, that “choreography of thinking and sensing”, as Rolando puts it.

I am not often moved by academic work, but I am by the poetic quality of this work.'