Border Reading: Epistemic Reading and the Worlding of Postcolonialism

Journal Article

• Publication Online URL: Border Reading: Epistemic Reading and the Worlding of Postcolonialism
• Tags: Decolonization, worlding postcolonialism, indigenous, magical realism, border reading, epistemicide.
• Magazine \ Newspaper: Transmodernity
• Issue Number: 2
• Volume Number: 7
• Pages: 1-16

Publication Abstract

What Robert Young has called postcolonialism’s “secular terms” has resulted in the marginalization of postcolonial literary enactments of indigenous knowledge. Today, with the globalization of literary studies, the threat to literary formulations of indigenous knowledge is paramount. As the demand in the academic marketplace shifts from postcolonial to world literature courses, literary expressions of indigenous subaltern knowledge and indigenous discursive strategies are more at risk of being co-opted by a globalized literary practice that is rooted in what Simon Gikandi calls “Leavasite Englishness” than ever before. This paper argues for a postcolonial, decolonized critical practice that is attentive to reading indigeneity as subaltern knowledge. The proposed reading strategy, border reading, has its theoretical foundations in Walter Mignolo’s border gnosis and addresses the relevance of the marginalization of indigenous knowledge, especially in light of the global rise of world literature courses