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Decolonial praxis in writing studies (WS) is not altogether new for Latinxs. For many of us, the commitment to decolonial thinking, writing, and teaching might be traced to the groundbreaking work of late indigenous Chicanx feminist Gloria Anzaldúa. Like Anzaldúa, we have spent a considerable amount of time resisting patterns of thought that arose in the context of European colonialism. For Latinxs and other scholars of color, the effects of colonialism are most damaging, yet least understood, in WS. The critical project of decoloniality inspires new conceptual formulations to account for colonial knowledge practices still limiting the study of written language and to enact anti-colonial resistance and transformation. The matter of how decolonial concepts might fit within existing frameworks and imaginaries of the field gives rise to a range of potentials and obstacles for practitioners, and we address a few here.
One of the main problems with WS is its own colonial unconscious. Studies of written language still theorize and teach writing as an alphabetic technology that emerged in Western Europe and spread throughout the world from ancient Greece to imperial Rome to enlightenment Germany, to eighteenth-century Anglo-North America by way of Western global expansion. Two centuries later, in the twentieth century, while Eurocentric ontologies remained dominant, we witnessed a "moment when . . . decolonial skepticism, and the creative thought of figures such as the Caribbean-Algerian Frantz Fanon and the Chicana Gloria Anzaldúa ... animate[d] new forms of theorizing based on the scandal in the face of the continuity of dehumanizing practices and ideas" associated with limited Eurocentric theories and knowledge and meaning-making practices (Maldonado-Torres 4). Along with this decolonial skepticism, the "imperative of epistemic decolonization, and in fact, of a consistent decolonization of human reality was also born" (14).
Anzaldúa's work in particular helps us critique and ultimately supersede the field's hierarchy of knowledge adapted from colonial histories. Similarly, our attempt to formulate alternatives involves efforts to dismantle cultural hierarchies still enforced by colonialism. Furthermore, decolonizing WS involves rethinking and revising the field's teleological macro-narratives of human progress, with whitened, Europeanized fourth-century Greeks cemented as the field's intellectual cradle.
We apply the theories of Anzaldúa, Enrique Dussel, Linda Tuiwai Smith, Walter Mignolo and others outside the field to analyze how colonized populations are...