Modernities and the Making of Worlds

Abstract

This article reflects on the complicity between critical literacy, modernity, spatiality and temporality, not only in the creation of a world, but also in living in, inhabiting and cohabiting within a world. Taking the notions of creative adaptation, transculturation and inhabitance as starting points, it reflects on the complicity/relation between critical literacy, alternative modernities and political resistance/dissent in making a world that could be shared with others, one in which we accept cohabitance. Literature and its potential to disclose multiple views of the world and underscore complexity are central to the argument. The article reflects tentatively on how a sense or spirit of place (a complicity maybe) is invoked by the relation between modernities, spatiality and temporality. At a time and place where the epistemic violence of Western modernity and colonialism is at its most pertinent, multiple ways to open possibilities for epistemic justice, and for co-making and cohabiting worlds, should be explored. The complicity of epistemology in many of the injustices of the past should be acknowledged, but then also explored and analyzed. This article is one small attempt in such an exploration.