Summary
The House of Modernity is a teaching image that pictures modern society as one house, to ask what holds it up and who pays. It comes from Vanessa Andreotti, Sharon Stein and colleagues in the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, first published in 2017, and gathers critiques from Indigenous, Black, decolonial and post-colonial scholarship.
The house has “a foundation of separability”, two carrying walls – universal reason and the nation state – and a roof of global capital. Its costs fall on those in the basement and outside. Further frames show how it shapes inhabitants’ reasoning, fears and desires. The authors call it “one of many possible diagnoses”.
Rationale
We interviewed Azul Carolina Duque of the collective. Its claim that our troubles stem from “a colonial habit of being”, not missing information or strategy, is close kin to what Part 1 calls ‘cultural habits’.
Diagram not reproduced here (rights reserved) — see it at decolonialfutures.net ↗