Telling Stories, Developing Theory: How we come to know what we know

• In Event: 40803 - New Directions in Critical Theory: Racial Capitalism, Du Boisian Sociology, and Decolonial Perspectives

Abstract

Beyond what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls the abyssal line (Santos 2014), are disposability regimes deployed to dominate, marginalize, and oppress Black and sometimes Brown people with the goal of maintaining the modern capitalist world order as well as a hierarchy of being as understood through an illegitimate Western lens of modernity. Disposability (Grell-Brisk 2022) as understood here, is the structured practice and engaged view that certain people, particularly Black folx, are easily accessible and available for exploitation, and easily discardable when their utility has diminished or halted. Disposability regimes are manifested in law, art, science, technology, and academic knowledge production and are rooted in the coloniality of power (Quijano 2000) as well as the coloniality of being (Mignolo 2011). They occupy structural locations that define much of the interactions and relationships in the capitalist world-system and in our quotidian lives. This paper is a phenomenological study of academic knowledge production through the lens of disposability; I examine the use of language, academic disciplinary silos and the manipulation of the very idea of Black liberation as tools of disposability. Through stories, I disentangle and engage with the logics of and relationship between parasitism (Grell-Brisk 2023) and disposability, and coloniality of power and being.

Author

• Marilyn Grell-Brisk, Pitzer College