“From the Margins of Possibility: Decolonizing the Cognitive Order”

• In Event: 30462 - Theory Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1. Anticolonial, Postcolonial, and Decolonial Perspectives

Abstract

“Decolonize now” is a common mandate in radical social thought, especially coming from the Global South. How do different groups think about and articulate this possibility, and what can we then learn from them about social conceptions of possibility? Or, what can we learn from groups imagining and inhabiting the margins of what hegemonic culture deems possible or impossible? Both imagination and the suppression of certain ontologies have been discussed widely across social science, postcolonial theory, and cultural studies, but these fields often have failed to explore recovering these imaginations and ways of being—and therefore fail in illustrating possible futures. A Decolonial imagination, which envisions a world unrestricted by the inherited colonial-cognitive maps which mediate much of our imagination, provides us interesting possibilities as sociologists, especially as we seek to remediate oppressive social orders.

Across critical case studies of groups embodying “alter-ontologies” (Papadopoulos 2010; 2018; Sravansky 2017) and non- and counter-hegemonic conceptions of the possible—from modern witches “manifesting” material security outside capitalism, to Kashmiri feminists theorizing a world beyond the State, to outlining how Indigenous relationalities shift dominant conceptions of an anthrocentric world—these groups create and project shared ideas of possibility which challenge conventional social-cognitive orders. The need for theory and praxis which reorient the destructive tendencies of our current global order is more pressing than ever. I argue the line between what we deem politically impossible and possible needs to shift in the shared imagination to see new systems of liberatory social order materialize. By looking at groups whose very notions of ontology and possibility challenge hegemonic structures—by blurring lines between social and cognitive categories, or by articulating alternative possibilities for a current social order—I hope to better elucidate the connections between imagining and social change. If we can redraw the inherited cognitive maps drawn by colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy and anthrocentrism, can we remake the world?

Author

• Apoorvaa Joshi, Rutgers University-New Brunswick