Sketching the Contours of Wynter’s Decolonial Sociography

• In Event: The Politics of Citation in Curriculum Studies

Abstract

Building upon Fanon’s and Wynter’s theory of sociogeny, this paper sketches the contours of decolonial sociography. Fanon’s words, “alongside phylogeny and ontogeny, there is also sociogeny” (2008, p. xv), inform the theoretical piece through questions of sociogenesis such as: How are the disciplining and dehumanizing discourses and practices experienced and collectively resisted by negatively racialized subjects? What are the conditions that enable people to resist and take action? And, since racial-colonial narratives try to destroy collective memories to distort the understanding of the modern/colonial order of things, why is that many continue to collectively reclaim, live, narrate, and embody their histories and struggles to prefigure a decolonial future in the present?

The inextricable link between sociogeny, coloniality of being, and race is examined by asking how discourses and social practices establish global racial-colonial structures of subjugation and exploitation through pedagogies of domination. Decolonial sociography situates racial-colonial processes as geopolitically entangled within the modern/colonial world system and recognizes that racialization is distinctively configured within specific historical contexts. The author posits that decolonial sociography constitutes not only a counter-cartography (Erasmus, 2020), but also a methodological shift towards examining the interconnected symbolic and material structures that shape experiences of modernity/coloniality/decoloniality (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018), particularly education institutions, curriculum, and pedagogy.

Existing alongside these global paradigms of modernity/coloniality/decoloniality is a spirit of resistance. The article examines facets around this resistance, its complexity, and existence. In conjunction with Fanon’s and Wynter’s work, the article invokes Glissant's (1997) poetics of relations and the works of Toni Morrison to highlight the persistence of resistance and relational modes of existence that counteract the totalizing and homogenizing effects of modernity/coloniality’s pedagogies of domination that legitimate sociogenesis of race.

A decolonial sociography supports a self definition and its power through a process of inquiry and unlearning/learning/relearning knowledge. A graduate student perspective is then theorized around the state of the coloniality of knowledge or coloniality of curriculum (Fúnez-Flores, 2023; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Quijano, 2007) with questions: What is knowledge? How do I know what I know? What does it mean to know? What does it mean to unlearn? How are knowledge and trust interrelated? And, how are knowledge and community interrelated?

Author

• Rhyanne Wheat, Texas Tech University