Back in San Diego Miget Explains it All
I hope you can hear Miget as he gets his philosopher on in the latter part of the podcast, I was waving him closer to the mic. We didn't sing or take pictures today but we did have a good discussion about the Indigenous Studies conference, our work and Miget shares some interesting thoughts about decolonization and sovereignty. All in less than forty minutes! Enjoy!
posted by Anonymous @ 7:59 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
great post! cant wait to read your papers ;)
cs
so this comment might be premature considering i have not read the papers...but oh well ;)
the sentence "decolonization is suicide" has always struck me as a powerful use of figurative language that has successfully disabled further figurations of decolonization on guam. and i've always appreciated miget's work on interrogating the discourse of colonialism and showing how these kinds of figurations function to continue the enabling of colonial structures and colonized subjects (along with the work of Pratt and Said, at least in my minimal reading).
what strikes me also is miget's refusal to retreat from this figuration and simply formulate other contesting figurations (such as "decolonization is freedom" or "decolonization is...whatever"), which are simply other figurations which may vie for imaginative space, but doesn't confront the much more potent and imaginative "...is suicide" (and perhaps so potent on guam for its connotation of religious betrayal / sin).
to me, miget's thoughts embody the figuration. which is to say, he becomes the figure of the figurative language. and not to prove that it IS suicide, but to suggest that "suicide" can have a different meaning. this directly confronts and transforms the figure into something new, and perhaps can capture the colonized imagination.
so that IF, as miget suggests, multiple readings of "suicide" are made available in a world where language often operates against us, it is perhaps a defiant act to reconfigure a figuration in a way that resists the linear uses of that language's perverse banality: sentences that justify wars, hide the truth, make laws that strangle and deny, etc. By resisting the closure of such sentencing (what one poet calls "the sentencing in sentencing") the new figure (i will have to read the paper to see what happens) confronts the closure of suicide, its sin and logic, and figures something New and Open: perhaps our continued re-definitions of what is possible as our existence.
ugh...i am a poet and writing paragraphs make me tired...this is the most sentences i've written since the Carter Administration!!! i dont know how you folks do it!!!
anyways, thanks for the opportunity to listen. you folks are very inspiring and thought provoking.
okay, now i will wait patiently for the papers ;)
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