Epistemologies for Conviviality or “Zumbification”

Abstract

Inspired by Frantz Fanon’s thought, this paper is a diagnostic of the present time, enacted as a “psychotic reaction” that melts together different scriptural registers to advance the notion of conviviality as a space of analytical experimentation, where inequality and difference share the condition of conceptual isonomy. The experiment performed in this article tries to accomplish this goal by exploring the vernacular repertoire of the Brazilian junction of an afro-indigenous Atlantic. Its analytical idea, zumbification, is the sketch of an epistemological subject-position, whose labor consists in a kinesics of (at least) three movements: 1) the situatedness needed for making political demands; 2) the decenteredness necessary for attenuating the harmful effects of (even strategic) essentialism and the unavoidable reproduction of hegemonic exclusionary patterns; 3) the willfulness required for amplifying subalternized epistemological approaches, so that they may become more pervasive.