A Place Called Sur

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A place called Sur
“When the people looses the control, the use, and the management of its ancestral land, the ones who lose more are new generations because they won’t have space to learn about themselves and the practice of their cultural difference” Zenon
For the French-born, Chile based theorist, Nelly Richard, to think in place could be expressed as a reactive fear against the metanarratives, against the stability a coherence that protected identities and homogeneous traditions delimited under the national banner. Place—as a defensive response versus the global erasure of borders—becomes a nostalgic haven for the purity of originary cultures, endangered by the polluting forces of global capitalism. (Richard: 2009) Likewise, place could be understood, not as the natural evolution of an original territoriality but more like a situated difference, a difference with a tactical location that intervenes the geographies of power, that is to say, the maps of institutions and metropolitan circuits that administrate the value of “cultural diversity”. Place, therefore, becomes a tactical positioning, in tension between the globalizing forces, and micro-differenced folds, stratifications or irregular zones. According to Richard, practices of artistic and cultural intervention become local in the global map rescuing the textures of historic and social experience in its specific context.
Richard proposes the concept-metaphor of Sur (or South) as a tactical maneuver for the potent enuntiative and performative category of “diference” that challenges the system.
“Sur” is a line of ambiguity that drives the Latin American to not give up to contrast is sub-local differences with the metropolitan-multicultural equivalences, while at the same ...

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...o-Andean Thought and Diasporic Ancestrality. M,P, Banchetti-Robino and C,R, Headley (editors), Shifting the geography of reason: Gender, science and religion. Cambridge Scholars press, UK, 2006.

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[ 1 ]. The construction of whiteness has different stages that would eventually determine that Spaniards, albeit European would still be considered subaltern though what Mignolo has called imperial colonial difference.
[ 2 ]. From Canada to Patagonia, Indigenous peoples have proposed to re-appropriate the Kuna word Abya-Yala to name the continent(s) now called Americas. It is worth mentioning that the Abya-Yala denomination exclude Afro descendant populations.
[ 3 ]. Proceso de Comunidades Negras del Ecuador, Propuesta para la creacion de una Comarca Territorial de Negros en la provincia de Esmeraldas (Quito: RisperGRAF, 1999), 5.

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