Decolonising and the Aesthetic Turn in International Studies: Border Thinking, Co-creation and Voice

Abstract

The aesthetic turn (AT) in International Studies stresses the ongoing task of marshalling non-western insights to better explore the agency of the globally marginalised in discourses about representability. Decolonial literature also calls specifically for more understanding of relationality and co-creativity underpinning agency and voice in global politics. Building on this decolonialising challenge, this article embeds a focus on ‘ordinary language use’ within a ‘decolonial orientation’ to open up complexities around the politics of representability. It specifically employs the concept of ‘border thinking’ by Walter Mignolo; and centres struggles in language by Gloria Anzaldúa as well as in the vernacular language ‘Verlan’ (as used by working-class racially marginalised people in France) to think ‘from’ the border. Highlighting how language works across (not just within) different registers and forms, the categories of ‘non-standard’ and ‘standard’, ‘domination’ and ‘resistance’ are destabilised. This provides the basis for re-centring Othered voices within a more relational co-creative ontology, by making the entanglement of discipline and resistance a space to think modernity from, rather than a space of interruption into modernity.