dr. daniel b coleman

Scholarly commitments and areas of inquiry:

My scholarly project is a descendant of the modernity/(de)coloniality working group that was forged between scholars at UNC Chapel Hill and Duke University in the early 2000s. The learning/unlearning I engaged in from the pedagogical leadership of a number of those involved in this group, alongside my training in performance and cultural studies under the tutelage of Dr. Della Pollock and my learning/existing in the contexts of Southern Mexico and the Southern United States, have formed what my  knowledge practice is today. Thusly, my scholarship is invested in continuing the epistemological and ontological interventions that arise in the ongoing query of the presence of modernity/coloniality, including considerations of forms of rebellion and refusal against its many-faced hydra that appears in late capitalism, corporate empires, and their dynamics of anthropocentric cisheteropatriarchal and racist violence, extraction, and the destruction of life. I am most interested in projects and interventions that forge something other than what is here. I look at social movement work and cultural and performance performance work in the United States and Abya Yala (Latin America), including identity and subjectivity formation, spiritual-political otherwise(s), and creative methods for refusing the extreme violence and erasure ever-present in these necropolitical/necroliberal contexts. I am geopolitically focused on the Hemispheric Americas with regional specificities in the U.S. South and Southern Mexico and all the ways that Black/Afro-descendant, Native/Indigenous, and other people of color continue to make life happen in spite of the ongoing forms of genocide, dispossession, and eradication that are present. In particular, I am most interested in how cisgender women, transgender people, and other gender variant and queer beings provide creative forms of leadership beyond the silos that attempt to restrain the lives of our species. 

In the learning/unlearning that decolonial, performance, and cultural studies scholars have guided me on, I was taught how to articulate a practice that was already organic to how I move in the world. That is to say, my "research" inquiries are driven by the process of making the path while walking/doing (adaptations of Antonio Machado, Paulo Freire, Frantz Fanon, and the Zapatistas vis-a-vis Catherine Walsh's uptake, M. Jacqui Alexander's movements, and now mine). My scholarship is an endeavor to record and theorize a critical archive of this path. This means that though my work does not situate itself as primarily authoethnographic or autobiographical, my investigations, analyses, and areas of scholarly-artistic-activist inquiry arise from being/existing and moving in the world, in relation to others (seen and unseen). Therefore, personal narrative has a role in making theory and documenting culture, contributing to a long history of women and queer of color critique/feminisms, while not standing in as the "all" of what I do. Like those that trained and/or preceded me, I continue to walk while asking questions about what the conditions of our existences are, in the service of what they could/should be and how we make ways out of no ways. 

I am a student of Dr. Sylvia Wynter's philosophical and theoretical corpus as one that continues to provide a framework for understanding how the project of the Human/man was created from the minds of what Tiffany Lethabo King has called "conquistador-settlers." Working with Wynter's hemispheric framings of the Human project, I bring decolonial, feminist, Africana, Native/Indigenous, and trans thought about race and gender to bare on the many problems with singular ideas about humanness, and the present iterations of the purported "totality" from which it arises. I am invested in articulating the poetry of racial and gender incoherence and impurity at this particular historical juncture, particularly given the many dispossessions and diasporas that frame much of life in the continental Americas. In this way, my work is always to unsettle attempts to conclude, enclose, perfect, or master what we think we know about race, gender, and other Human inventions. To decolonize, then, is always an aspirational horizon and not one that is possible to arrive at, even as the perpetual journey towards it is always worth the endeavor. 

By final way of introduction to my scholarly practice and inquiries, I am passionate about defending the existence of the pluriverse, or, to cite the Zapatistas "un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos" [a world where many worlds fit]. I refuse any notion of a singular totality or attempts to fit our species into singular totalities for all of the cosmogonies/cosmologies, world views and world senses, and modes existence that get eviscerated in any attempt to make our species cohere into a singular idea of what life should be. Rather than conflate the idea of "our world" with "our planet," I theorize from the margins that demonstrate the existence of many worlds (the pluriverse) rather than the colonial epistemological project of A world.