Cordoba’s Social and Community Cinema Network in the praxis of Decolonial Pedagogy

Abstract

This article associates the workshop activity carried by a cluster of Cordoba’s community cinema groups to the legitimization dynamics of Decolonial Pedagogy (Walsh, 2013), understanding the later as praxis of a “Dispositive” (Foucault, 1980, [1977]); the Decolonial dispositive. This since its power/knowledge relations are a counter hegemonic practice within the onto-epistemological dynamics of reproduction of what Aníbal Quijano (2000) called “Coloniality of Power” (or the Power dispositive in Foucauldian discourse analysis terms). The essay observes how community cinema follows both the stages proposed by Decolonial Pedagogy as unavoidable steps towards subaltern’s emancipation. 1- To question hegemonic knowledges and identities by adding on the critical self-identification of subaltern historical conditioning circumstances, something community cinema achieves by prompting the learning and understanding of audio-visual language as an apparatus of colonial-capitalist ideology reproduction (I state that they face “coloniality of being” with that). 2- To carry a teleology towards a decolonized life, an aim community cinema attains by aiding subaltern’s technological appropriation to produce meaning throughout their films’ messages as well as through their “Other” forms of production’s social relations (I claim they face “coloniality of knowledge” with that).