The Kaxlanization of the Affections, by Delmar Penka

Abstract

This essay examines how feeling and expressing affects, understood as constitutive components of ways of life (human and non-human), emerge from conviviality and, consequently, can be shaped both by ancestral forms of knowledge and by historical processes of domination (colonialism, evangelization, and capitalism). The essay is authored by Delmar Penka, a young researcher and essayist from Chiapas, Mexico. Penka mobilizes the Tseltal concept kaxlan—originally used to designate non-Indigenous others—to develop the notion of the “kaxlanization of affects,” understood as the internalization of modes of feeling associated with the white world. Without advancing a moral judgment of affective practices originating in the non- -Indigenous world, the author argues that the problem of colonization stems from a lack of affective serendipity, that is, from a limited willingness to learn from other practices in a reversal of its unilateral trajectory.

KEYWORDS: Affect. Delmar Penka. Mexico. Colonialism.