Border wounds: A critical review of identity from interstitiality

Abstract

The objective of this article is to develop an initial methodological approach that allows a critical review of the concept of identity, displacing it from essentialist and biologicist discourses. We propose a review of this from what we will call an interstitial approach. (Dotson, 2014), which allows us to live in conflict and, complexity and build a new language based on hybrid and border matters. The question about the place and the consequences of the theory leads us to point out the wounds that are revealed in the lived-in bodies, attending above all to the gaps in a language shaped by a colonial discourse that hides layers (Cusicanqui, 2014) and excludes certain modes of subjectivation. The article insists on the impossibility of “purifying” language and returning to a more inclusive original moment that does not generate violence on the lived-in bodies, because, to avoid the simplification of the discourse (“magic words”), decolonization is understood as a process, provisional and never conclusive. In this way, the review of the concept of identity leads to the deconstruction of the masks’ dialectic as it has operated in colonial devices, that is, from imposition and whitewashing (Echeverria, 2007) - thus simplifying and prohibiting certain subjectivities. Finally, the article aims to calls for attention to complexity from a “third identification” (Anzaldúa, 2016) that takes into account the social, economic, geopolitical, epistemic and linguistic spheres, and their conceptual overflow, as the matrix for the generation of a new language.