The TransMediterranAtlantic Decolonial Turn

Can Imagination Un/Wall Geo-political and Disciplinary Boundaries?

Abstract

The essay aims at de/clining and at the same time questioning the methodology of de/linking, des/prenderse, dis/connecting from the politics, aesthesis, and geo-psycho-corpo-graphies of modern/imperial powers and epistemologies still at work. The inspirational writings, performances and actions nurturing the critical,poetical, political and ethical perspective I here define “other than TransAtlantic archaeology of coloniality” – a Southern archaeology contemplating the ‘transmediterranianization’ of the Atlantic and of the postcolonial and the decolonial routes – come from the encounters with non-nationalistic intellectuals, activists and diasporic talents expressing transgressive visions of the state of things in their po(li)et(h)ical works and epistemologies (ref.: thecolonialidad/modernidad school; the philosophy of consciousness filtered through Maria Lugones’ gendered decolonial lens; African and Afro-diasporic post-colonial forerunners; Gloria Anzaldúa’s elaboration of border thinking/crossing and its development into the decolonial space of conocimiento she calls ‘nepantla’, 2002). As a component of the activist cultural and aesthetic research project UN/WALLING THE MEDITERRANEAN - S/MURARE IL MEDITERRANEO. Local, national and trans-border ARTivist practices for a poetics and politics of hospitality and mobility (Bari Univ., 2009-today) predicated by decolonial thinking, in this paper I speak from a Southern Mediterranean geo-corpo-graphical peninsular perspective and history in order to develop a Southern border critical thinking delinked from the normativity of geo-political, hetero-normative and ‘modern’ disciplinary boundaries.