What if many of our deepest crises are connected to the way we have learned to know the world?
In this episode of Voices of Emergence, Nigerian-Finnish writer, feminist theorist, and cultural critic Minna Salami joins Alex de Carvalho and Rudy de Waele for a wide-ranging conversation about knowledge, power, identity, feminism, decolonization, beauty, and what it means to recover a more fully human way of perceiving reality.
Drawing from her book "Sensuous Knowledge," Minna challenges the dominance of rationality as our primary way of knowing. Human beings also understand through emotion, intuition, the body, lived experience, contemplation, relationship, art, and our participation in the living world. What changes when these forms of knowledge are no longer treated as inferior?
From there, the conversation moves into African feminism and the relationship between epistemology and power; the warmth and relationality that can be lost through individualism; and the growing difficulty of holding different perspectives without turning difference into polarization.
Minna offers a different orientation: polyphony. Rather than searching for a single worldview capable of explaining everything, what if we learned to hold multiple realities with curiosity, flexibility, and what Alex calls "perceptual generosity"?
They also explore decolonization as a living process rather than an attempt to erase the past, Jungian individuation as a way of holding difference without losing one's center, and the role of art, silence, beauty, and contemplation in helping us encounter one another beyond ideological positions.
At the heart of the conversation is a deceptively simple proposition: we are nature. We are not separate observers standing outside the world we are trying to understand or transform.
Minna is the author of "Sensuous Knowledge" and "Can Feminism Be African?" Her forthcoming US edition, "Feminist Freedom: An African Vision," explores freedom through African feminist thought while opening into a much larger question about the kind of world we might create together.
Hosted by Alex de Carvalho and Rudy de Waele, Voices of Emergence brings together thinkers, builders, and creators exploring how new systems of meaning, leadership, and regeneration are emerging through us: voicesofemergence.com
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🎵 Intro & Outro Music
Used with permission from AWARË
Track: Journey Live 5
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