Singing as Un Saber del Sur, or Another Way of Knowing

• Published in: Toronto Journal of Theology
• Main Author: Whitla, Becca
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) 2018
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/tjt.2017-0150; https://utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/tjt.2017-0150

In this article, I show how one song, “El Espíritu de Dios,” can be a source of knowledge and an act of epistemic disobedience, even amid the increasingly complex dynamics of the “coloniality of music.” When it is sung in embodied ways from below, it affirms knowledge as something that emerges out of the oral tradition arising from the heart of a community's life and experience. It is understood to belong to the community, in this case multiple local Latin American communities. This embodied, oral, communal singing challenges prevailing Eurocentric norms that emphasize written texts, individual ownership, and rationalist intellectualism, represented in Euro-North-Atlantic epistemologies of the Enlightenment. When it is sung as a fully embodied holistic human expression, it instead actualizes an act of hope, another way of knowing, un saber del sur (knowledge from the South), which defies forces that oppress and the pervasiveness of coloniality. Who we are and who we want to become as active agents of a liberative praxis proclaiming what is and what ought to be, the already and not yet of the Reign of God, emerges. Understanding the dynamics of (de)coloniality in hymns and songs involves affirming songs like “El Espíritu de Dios,” which express an-other way of knowing and singing and a decolonial mode for doing theology.