Place-in-Being: A Decolonial Phenomenology of Place in Conversation with Philosophies of the Americas

Our experiences of place and emplacement are so fundamental to our everyday existence that most of us rarely dedicate much time to thinking about how place and emplacement impact the various aspects of our daily lives. In this work, I apply a decolonial lens to philosophy of place literature and argue that philosophical approaches to place should recognize and consider, what I term, the coloniality of space, the pluriversality of place, and place-in-being. The coloniality of space describes the pattern of valuing the concept of “space” over “place” in Western philosophical literature as motivated by projects of colonization. The Western philosophers that I discuss in my second chapter, value the concept of space over place since space is ascribed the characteristics of universality and limitless expansion. I note that this affinity towards space, and especially the erasure of place, is connected to coloniality and colonization. My third chapter argues in favor of critical phenomenologies of place, while my fourth chapter, in conversation with North American Indigenous philosophies, applies a decolonial lens to Western philosophical literature of place and defends what I call the pluriversality of place. The pluriversality of place conceptualizes the existence of multiple ways of theorizing place, as well as naming the experiences some might have of singular places manifesting in plural ways. Lastly, my fifth chapter draws on two philosophies from the Americas, American pragmatism and Latina feminist border thought, to argue that place-in-being be recognized as one way of understanding the relationship between pluriversality of place and multiplicitous selfhood. Place-in-being is meant to describe the profound and unique relationships we can form with places, and how places can mediate certain affective dimensions of experience, such as intersubjectivity, temporality, vitality, ontological possibility, and the preservation of habit.2024-04-1