Border gnoseologyAkwaeke Emezi and the decolonial other-than-human

  1. López Rodríguez, Marta Sofía
Zeitschrift:
Ecozon@ [Ecozona]: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment

ISSN: 2171-9594

Datum der Publikation: 2022

Titel der Ausgabe: The postcolonial nonhuman

Ausgabe: 13

Nummer: 2

Seiten: 77-91

Art: Artikel

DOI: 10.37536/ECOZONA.2022.13.2.4669 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_opene_Buah editor

Andere Publikationen in: Ecozon@ [Ecozona]: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment

Zusammenfassung

The underlying assumption when speaking about the postcolonial nonhuman is that the other-than-human refers to what could be called, broadly speaking, the “natural world,” as opposed to “the human-as-Man,” but still usually understood in (Western) secular terms. Nevertheless, from the perspective of African onto-epistemologies, the nonhuman can also refer to the spiritual world, or to the diverse assemblages between the “natural,” the human and the sacred. “Freshwater” and “Dear Senthuran. A Black Spirit Memoir”, by Akwaeke Emezi, open up a space of “border gnoseology,” where contemporary Anglo-American discourses on transsexuality intersect with African ontologies and epistemologies, specifically with the well-known figure of the “ogbanje” and the sacred python as an avatar of Ala, the Earth goddess in Igbo culture, to produce a radically subversive embodied subjectivity. The ideas of movement, transing, tranimalcy and (transatlantic) crossing conspire to dismantle conventional Eurocentric humanist views on selfhood and identity. Reading Emezi on their own terms also requires revisiting alternative notions of temporality beyond secular, cisheteronormative, modern time, as well as an understanding that the sacred and the spiritual are indeed essential to the worldview and the processes of subjectivation of millions of people across the globe.

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Fuente de los datos: Dialnet