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Reimagining Pluriversal Worlds
weaving the many strands of Pluriversality
Overview
I am tentatively calling the book, Reimagining Pluriversal Worlds. It's a placeholder title; I am not yet sure what it will finally be. The evolution of the book will decide the title. I am letting its emergent unfolding guide my sensemaking. I am more of an amanuensis listening within and sensing without as I write.
The book is taking shape slowly. I will be occasionally writing about the process of writing my book here. So far, it has been a wild journey of dialogues, research, shattering news, sleepless nights, and endless scribbling, scrapping, and scripting. The process has been illuminating, challenging, humbling, and exhilarating. It has also been painful, doubt-ridden, and scary. "Why am I even thinking of writing a book?" has been floating about in my heart for ever. I have asked myself repeatedly if it is for some kind of name or fame. And every time, I have come up with a 'no'. Not because I wouldn't like some name or fame, but I honestly doubt if this book will get me either. Then, why am I writing it? Simply because it is something I cannot not do. It is as much for myself as my readers. It is a chronicling and unraveling of my journey thus far; it is also a reweaving of loose threads, untangling and entwining them in new combinations. It is my small calm gift to the world.
As Clarissa Pinkola Estes poignantly wrote, “Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor, suffering world, will help immensely.”
This book is the only small calm thing that I could offer to a wounded world. To a beautiful and aching planet. It is an outcome of the times and a witness to the shifting trajectories. The hegemony is splintering and fragmenting. New world orders are emerging from the shadowy corners, arising from hitherto unacknowledged and unseen voices.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
~The Second Coming, W.B. Yeats
We are precisely at this point in our civilizational trajectory that Yeats wrote about more than a hundred years ago to describe the atmosphere of post-War Europe. The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War. Today, we are once again at the crossroads; the imperial-colonial-neoliberal-neocolonial order is splintering and crumbling. Built on violence, its end is going to be equally gory and ghastly. Nonetheless, this necro-capitalist order is ending—besieged on all sides by ordinary people, by the forces of nature, and voices rising from the rubbles of Gaza, from the mines of Congo, from the refugee camps in Sudan. There is a coalescing and weaving of these different nodes that is creating a wondrously diverse and profoundly rich web of interconnected narratives, of cosmologies and ontologies that are sweeping away the debris of hegemony.
The impossible has become not only eminently possible but also manifesting in unforeseen and unprecedented actions on the streets, in universities, at homes, in schools, and in parliaments across the world. The times they are a changin’. And how! These winds of change have been building up to gale-level force for a very long time, away from the mainstream, flying under the radar, hidden away in the edges and margins where no reporter intrudes and no prying eyes exist. Now, these myriad big and small movements and coalescing, connecting, and interweaving into indomitable forces. These forces are radically different from the power-drunk hegemony.
These forces embody a vision of a world that goes beyond nation-state controlled borders and boundaries, that cuts across nationalities, and guides us towards pluriversal futures. This book is an attempt to unravel the various interlinked threads that are collectively weaving new futures. I also focus on the kinds of organizations that will be needed to usher in and nurture the emergence of new visions. I use the word ‘organizations’ broadly to indicate institutions, corporations, and even communities and collectives of people working, collaborating, and co-creating. I call such organizations ‘Wayfinders’. I believe organizations can become crucibles and containers for emerging futures--microcosms of the world we wish to inhabit and leave behind.
I describe the skills, capacities, and infrastructure that we will need to develop at scale to hold space for and nurture the tender emergence of new worlds orders. These are not 'new' in the sense of novel. These myriad different ways of being, seeing, relating, and sensing have always existed. But they were deliberately delegitimized and rendered invisible by a hegemonic order bent of control and power. The hegemony eschewed any narrative that may offer alternatives to their vision of dominance. These narratives are once again emerging--gradually but surely to become a part of the tapestry of possible futures being midwifed across the globe.
I also explore the leadership attributes and qualities of a pluriversal world. Needless to say, today’s ‘leaders’ have spectacularly failed in more ways than one in fulfilling their roles. They have degenerated into power-brokers and have rendered the word ‘leadership’ devoid of meaning. I go back to the root meaning of leadership which comes from the word ‘leider’ meaning ‘someone who facilitates the crossing of thresholds’. Never before has this meaning and manifestation of leadership been more necessary as at this point.
As the world hovers on the brink of polycrisis, we need threshold facilitators, bridge-builders, and holders of spaces. It is in these shapes and forms that leadership of possible futures are rising from unexpected corners. They are not socially constructed hollow strawmen. They are the ones who have crossed the threshold, seen the bottom of the abyss, and have walked back to build the bridges. In this part of the book, I explore these attributes in detail.
Finally, I write about reimagining regeneration. I have been a part of the movement that has been gaining steam over the last decade. I appreciate and admire all the work done by the different proponents—thinkers, writers, activists, artists, and scholars. However, I felt a sense of void. Something was missing. After a while, I realized that there were hardly any global south writers in this space. Yes, there were many writing about decolonization, imperialism, and neocolonial orders. But I didn’t see a bridge between these two areas of discourse and dialogue—decolonial futures and regeneration movement. This is what I attempt to do in this part of the book—build that bridge. I firmly believe that only a pluriversal world can be regenerative.
A civilizational narrative arising out of Eurocentric hegemony and a singular worldview lacks the foundations for true regeneration. A world where Congo, Gaza, and Sudan exist cannot be called regenerative by any stretch of our imagination. And the narrative that allows for their existence is not only lopsided but pernicious. Hence, when Tesla dreams of electric cars, we have a decimated Congo with tiny children in mines. It is impossible to be regenerative with an underlying narrative predicated on growthism, thingification, supremacy and separation. And add patriarchy to the mix.
Therefore, we need to reimagine regeneration from the ground up holding the vision of a pluriversal world—a world where many worlds fit.
Click on the links below to explore the other sections on this page.
Theme I. The Hegemonic Monomyth
This theme is roughly divided into ten chapters, where I introduce the current monomyth that has been running the show for almost five centuries, and the dangers of a single story. I explore how the imposition a hegemonic story—an economic monomyth—emanating from the Eurocentric imperial-colonial project has devastated the planet. And the continued dissemination of this monomyth of neoliberal capitalism through globalization and various enforced measures continue to decimate the planet for the privilege of a cartel of billionaires and the military-industrial-political-media nexus.
Deciphering the Past
Dangers of a Single Story
Epistemicide as Control
The Collapse of the Metanarrative
An Era of Discontinuity
The Liminal Space
Uncivilizing our Stories
The Tyranny of Technology
AI and the Age of Dissonance
Activating Exiled Capacities
I go on to discuss the various means of controlling the narrative practiced by the hegemony with a special focus on epistemicide——a crucial aspect of genocide and ethnic cleansing—where a deliberate attempt is made by the colonizer to eradicate the existence of the knowledge systems, works of art and scholarship, and all forms of history, learning, and sensemaking belonging to the colonized. Here, I explore how the decimation of cultures, rituals, and narratives play an important role in maintaining hegemonic control. This erasure of cultures has been an intrinsic part of colonization. And has led to tremendous loss of knowledge and wisdom. What we see as ‘normal’ and ‘the way it has always been’ is a carefully constructed reality built through violence, obliteration, suppression, imposition, ethnocide, ecocide, and epistemicide. I use examples from colonized nations to underscore this aspect of colonization and the fallacies it is built on.
I explore the collapse of this hegemonic monomyth into meaninglessness to the point where we are not only in the midst of a polycrisis but also a crisis of meaning making and in an age of profound dissonance. I postulate that this dissonance is deliberately designed by the hegemonic powers to keep people in a state of perpetual confusion through obfuscation, gaslighting, diffractions, and distractions. This keeps people not only discombobulated but also exhausted and benumbed from having to deal with a deluge of propaganda and misinformation. Confused people are easy to manipulate, polarize, and fragment so that the hegemony remains unchallenged and unfettered. However, this meta-narrative is collapsing on all fronts--economic, ecological, political, social, and spiritual—as a direct fallout of the hegemony premised on colonization and extraction, separation and supremacy, and power, profit, and privilege for a few.
I move on to how this dissonance is giving way to a liminal space where people across the globe—the hitherto delegitimized, unseen, and unheard voices—are refusing to concur with the hegemony’s narrative, standing in solidarity with the most vulnerable, creating communities of allyship, and marching in movements. These counter-hegemonic actions have always existed but now they are gaining force, coalescing and weaving different webs of alternatives. These webs of movements are offering visions outside of state-led and nation-driven machineries of power. Geopolitical analysts acknowledge that the unipolar world order led by the USA and supported by its vassal states is giving way to a multipolar world; I postulate that multipolarity is being further accompanied by pluriversality. Multipolarity doesn’t challenge the underlying monomyth of infinite growth but replaces a hegemonic power behemoth with many nodes existing in power differentials, measured by their economic growth.
Pluriversality is a decolonial vision of world beyond state machineries. It rises from the people and envisions a world where many worlds fit. This was initially articulated by the Zapatistas in their decolonial vision of a world during their protest on the day that NAFTA went into effect. I am trying to build on this with learnings from the works of writers like Boaventura de Santos, Walter Mignolo, Brand Reiter, Ashish Kothari, and many others. This is also supported by articles, books, social media threads, and posts from researchers, on the ground reporters, citizen journalists risking their all like those in Gaza, and other social observers. I claim no special insight or wisdom. I bear witness to the unfolding and reshaping of history, a scribe with a responsibility to be true to my observations.
I present their perspectives as direct counterpoints to the hegemonic universality of Western thoughts that has long dominated global discourses across all spectrum of subjects and topics. I argue that the monolithic understanding of reality propagated by Western thought is a fallacious imposition and has done irreparable harm to the planet and all sentient beings. I believe that the alternative visions and narratives can provide viable pathways for more equitable and regenerative futures. I firmly believe that the concept of a pluriverse is not merely a theoretical or academic notion; it is a powerful and radical vision advocating for the acknowledgement, recognition, and incorporation of diverse worldviews, epistemologies, and ontologies in our global understanding as we stand on the brink of a Change of Era as momentous as the Agricultural Revolution or the Industrial Revolution.