Epistemologies for conviviality, or zumbification

Abstract

This paper, inspired by Frantz Fanon’s thought, offers a diagnostic of our present times enacted as a “psychotic reaction” that melts together different scriptural registers to advance the notion of conviviality as a space of analytical experimentation where inequality and difference share the condition of conceptual isonomy. The particular thought experiment performed here tries to accomplish this goal by exploring the vernacular repertoire of the Brazilian junction of an afro-indigenous Atlantic. Its analytical gamble, zumbification, is the sketch of an epistemological subject-position whose labor consists in a kinesics of (at least) three movements: 1) the situatedness needed for effectively making political demands; 2) the decenteredness necessary for attenuating the harmful effects of (even strategic) essentialism as well as of the unavoidable reproduction of hegemonic exclusionary patterns; 3) the willfulness required for amplifying subalternized epistemological approaches so that they may become more pervasive.