College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

Necropower often relies on taxonomic distinctions between self and Other, a binary structure that is associated with gender binarism, digital dualism, and negations of life’s entanglement with death. This essay discusses deployments of paradox against these necropolitical binaries by Lukas Avendaño, a Binni Zaa (Zapotec) and muxe (nonbinary gender) artist and anthropologist, and Muxx Project, an artistic collective founded in 2020 by Avendaño and multimedia artists EYIBRA, Óldo Erréve, and Nnux. The essay’s “dialogical body” traces Avendaño and Muxx Project’s understandings of how their body-based and digital performances attempt to disrupt gender binarism and digital dualism, to then focus on Avendaño’s paradoxical view of life and death forged through artistic practice, and, most importantly, his experience as an activist confronting the complexities of necropower in contemporary Mexican politics. Following Avendaño’s theorization of the ouroboros as an embodiment of life’s paradoxical entanglement with death and the artist’s prioritization of action over theory, the essay concludes by reflecting on the potential of an ouroboric, or para-paradoxical, ontopolitics that might undo emergent necropolitical dichotomizations, such as that between the digital and the virtual, as they occur, potentially laying the ground for living, and dying, outside and beyond the binaries that undergird a violent world. 

Esta colaboración entre los tres autores consiste en un conjunto de “destellos” (yuxtaposiciones críticas) sobre las “transmociones sui generis”que  Gerald  Vizenor definió  como  el  derecho  inherente  al movimiento. Analizando los mecanismos y lógicas de la destrucción corpo-ontológica  en Mesoamérica,   se   nombran   las   relaciones sociológicas distintas entre los tres autores y como estas dan forma a la colaboración. Guarcax González narra detalles de su práctica en sonido/movimiento con  Grupo  Sotzil,  mientras  que  Brito  Bernal interroga    el    récord    arqueológico    en    cuanto    la    danza    en Centroamérica   para   reflexionar   sobre   sus   propósitos.   Firmino-Castillo  concluye  presentando  proyectos  de  movimiento  desde  la diáspora  que  son  animados  por  sus  relacionalidades  ontológicas persistentes. A la vez, estos son acercamientos que tratan el pasado y el presente de forma crítica para especular caminos hacia el futuro. Firmino-Castillo  concluye  argumentando  que  estos  acercamientos son  historiográficos,  pero  también historiológicos por  sus  posibles aplicaciones anticoloniales.

A collective essay that looks at movement in a place comprising what is now known as Mesoamerica or Central America, Mexico as well as parts of California and the southwestern United States. After elucidating how the violence of modernity/coloniality creates regimes of knowledge, aesthetics, and politics that deny corporeal self-determination, the authors offer varied, but interconnected, approaches to “transmotion” as embodied practices that generate relational sovereignties despite the ongoing violence visited upon persons in movement, especially at the artificial borders between the geopolitical bodies comprising Mesoamerica. The authors’ three voices relationally build upon each other to trace the complexities at the heart of decolonization, especially in regards to the diasporic, the dispossessed, and the displaced.

Drawing from Freya Mathews and Mario Blaser’s critiques of genocide, modernity, and coloniality, in addition to the unpublished writings of Raphaël Lemkin on colonialism, this study interrogates three ontological tenets associated with genocidal coloniality: that some persons are things, that matter is inert, and that some humans are autonomous of an ecological matrix. The author examines these tenets through the lens of Guatemala’s recent counter-insurgency war (1960—1996), focusing on the genocide against Ixil Maya communities during the height of the war (approximately 1979-1985). The author draws from work on collective art-based projects in Nab’aa’, Guatemala to examine how embodied performances of the inextricable relational ties between human and other-than-human persons and entities in an agentive and person-filled material world posed insistent challenges to genocidal coloniality’s three tenets. Three moments of performance, ranging from the quotidian to the ceremonial to the experimental, are highlighted: performing name exchange with a wild edible plant important to survival during wartime famine; performing chaj (ceremony) to address collective trauma from the 1982 mass killing at Xoloche’; and, finally, performing experimental theater in collaboration with Mexican artist, Violeta Luna, and Ixil performance ensemble, Teatro Tichiil. The author reflects on two terms prevalent in Mayan languages—kamawil, or living object, and kab’awil, “double gaze” (Adrián Inés Chávez in Chacón)—to explore the potential of Mayan ontologies of materiality and personhood to counter the colonial project’s construal of (some) persons as bodies only, to be used and disposed of as objects, in a world of inert matter. The author concludes by noting that this centering of persons (human and other) as relational beings underscores the ontological workings of what Gerald Vizenor termed “survivance,” understanding it to be an active resistance to the three tenets of coloniality through the embodied and storied insistence on complex relational personhood and the continued enactment of “transmotion” as inextricable relationality within a living and agentive material world.

This article discusses ways that Indigenous dance is an ontological praxis that is embodied and telluric, meaning “of the earth.” It looks at how dancing bodies perform in relationship to ecosystems and entities within them, producing ontological distinctions and hierarchies that are often imbued with power. This makes dance a site of ontological struggle that potentially challenges the delusional ontological universality undergirding imperialism, genocide, and ecocide. The author explores these theoretical propositions through her participation in Oxlaval Q'anil, an emerging Ixil Maya dance project in Guatemala, and Dancing Earth, an itinerant and inter-tribal U.S.-based company founded by Rulan Tangen eleven years ago.