Decolonialities and the Exilic Consciousness

Abstract

This chapter is a journey of thought exploring decolonial critique as a situated practice while thinking through exilic consciousness and its constitutive conditions. I begin by reflecting on decolonialities to gesture toward varied forms of decolonial projects that need to be situated, given that each location generates different sets of questions/problems that demand different answers. In this way, I reconfigure the exilic condition, and the space of displacement in general, as a plurilingual space that unsettles various colonial forms of epistemic monolingualism predicated on the self-sufficiency of thought. To this end, I reflect on the potentiality of exilic consciousness to generate decolonial critique when thinking from/about the Global South. Finally, this chapter demonstrates the significance of acknowledging the diverse locations and trajectories of decolonial critique and the plurality of thought embedded within the exilic intellectual formation that can potentially undo colonial forms of knowledge-making and being in the world.