"Following willful stones and the creative potential of refusal against cultural colonialism."
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"Following willful stones and the creative potential of refusal against cultural colonialism."
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“In this way, [Sara] Ahmed points out that willfulness has been predominantly understood not as a virtue (a lot of will as determination) but rather, as a negative expression of will (an excess of will as disobedience); the rhetoric is that if you defy authority, you must be corrected. The difference between will and willfulness thus has to do with where power is located; it is “a way of ordering human experience, [a] way of distributing moral worth,” Ahmed indicates—whatever gets in the way of the norm must be eliminated.”
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“Willfulness is not a possibility that stems from a choice but a resort to turn to after & precisely because the possibility of choice did not exist in the first place. It’s a reaction to not having been able to choose, only being able to say “no” to that which is being imposed.”
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“This mechanism of power can be understood as cultural colonialism, a process by which the universal imposition of a type of cultural expression, with its set of operations and values, negates others through their appropriation and reinterpretation, while emptying them of their original meaning so that they can respond to the new, over-imposed narrative.”
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“researcher Cherry-Ann Davis explains that decontextualization is a politics of display and a necessary maneuver to hide the many violations that occurred to obtain an “artifact” whilst turning it into a blank canvas ready to assimilate new meaning and relevance.”
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“However, the stone as Grandmother Kueka was not in itself sufficient for the request to be granted; it had to be framed within the parameters of legality defined by the nation-state, based on the assumption of separability between humans and nonhumans and thus articulated in the language of property. In this framework, the stone is defined by whom it belongs to, not in terms of continuity and relationality (what the stone is with). In other words, what for the Pemón is, for the categories under which the State operates is not.”
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“Her [Marisol de la Cadena’s] intent with not only is to slow down our practice of knowing and “to challenge what we know, the ways we know it, and even suggest the impossibility of our knowing—without such impossibility canceling the emergence” of being. In that sense, not only is also a willful practice because it refuses the negation of being and attends to that which is beyond the limits of modern knowledge and perception. And so, Kueka is a stone-person, is in continuity with her people, is a Grandmother, is a stone but not only.”