Border gnoseology

Akwaeke Emezi and the Decolonial Other-than-Human

Datos Bibliográficos

ID22011728
AutoresMarta Sofía López, Marta Sofía López Rodríguez (0000-0002-3041-4947, Universidad de León, autor de correspondencia)
Año2022
Volumen13
Número2
Páginas77-91
Fecha de publicación2022-10-29
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaEcozon European Journal of Literature Culture and Environment (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2171-9594 • E-ISSN: 2171-9594
EditorialUniversidad de Alcala (PUBLISHER • ES)
DOI10.37536/ecozona.2022.13.2.4669
OpenAlexW4307868886
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas4
Referencias citadas8

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 (2018) and Dear Senthuran. A Black Spirit Memoir (2021), 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 Emeke 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

Aesthetics · Art history · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Globe · Heaven · Humanism · Memoir · Sociology · Subjectivity · Temporality · Theology · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Philosophy

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