Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: From the CADAAD 2024 theme “Borders and boundaries in/across discourses”, which expanded boundaries beyond space, I look to decoloniality and intersectionality as critical thinking perspectives that offer a diversity of inputs into the debate. We may add the limits of the discursive construction of temporalities, subjectivities, knowledge, and identities to the most immediate meaning of geographical boundaries and their symbolic interfaces as positionalities. Seeking to think about how a relationship between decolonial and intersectional epistemological turns and critical discourse studies can challenge us epistemologically, I recall the impactful exhibition “Esta tierra jamás será fértil por haber parido colonos" (“This land will never be fertile for it gave birth to settlers”) by Daniela Ortiz, a young Peruvian artivist born in Cuzco and living in Spain, whose installations from several techniques and media are intended to document the flow that moves between the colonial past and the injustices that assail the present. The connection she makes between the colonial past and present reflects the inevitable question of how this connection points us to future possibilities. If we assume that coloniality is, in its essence, constitutive of the present, we must acknowledge that all criticism, deconstruction, and disruption must start from these boundaries and contradictions. Critical discourse studies situate intertextuality and interdiscursivity as inevitable aspects of all discourse, including theories. However, an admittedly interdiscursive critical theory-practice must explicitly acknowledge the limits of academic criticism.
Author: Viviane de Melo Resende
Institution: Universidade de Brasília
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7223342695