Mobile Localities Beyond Monocultures of the Mind

Abstract

Employing insights from contemporary postcolonial, decolonial, and indigenous theory, this article argues that home, identity, and the politics of naming “here” are emerging as complex “mobile localities” with implications for how a globalizing world is understood. The Cartesian reasoning that enabled Eurocentric perspectives to lay sole claim to universality is now being challenged by decolonizing views that understand locality through a framework more closely attuned to what Boaventura Sousa de Santos calls “an ecology of knowledges.” To hold to a single definition in a globalizing world increasingly marks a failure of imagination: a “monoculture of the mind” in a multicultural world. For many, locality may now be a form of translocality, in which alternative understandings of space and time co?exist, sometimes only concurrently, and sometimes mingling to form emergent understandings. The paper interprets two contemporary Canadian texts involved in renegotiating urban civic space??Cree poet Marvin Francis’s City Treaty: A Long Poem and Trinidadian?Canadian Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For: A Novel ?with the aim of providing a revised model for understanding locality in a globalizing world. Revisions of the local such as those offered by Brand and Francis reveal the potential for understanding locality as a living, moving, metamorphizing space rather than a determinant place of origin.