All posts tagged: arturo escobar

Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds

Reviewed by Hanna E. Morris, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Arturo Escobar. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University Press. 2018. 312 pages. “The notion of oww [One-World World] signals the predominant idea in the West that we all live within a single world, made up of one underlying reality (one nature) and many cultures. This imperialistic notion supposes the West’s ability to arrogate for itself the right to be ‘the world,’ and to subject all other worlds to its rules, to diminish them to secondary status or to nonexistence, often figuratively and materially. It is a very seductive notion […]” (Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse, 86). It is only fitting to begin this essay with a provocative quote—as the author of the book under review, Arturo Escobar, chooses to begin each chapter of Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (2018). Escobar, professor of anthropology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of several, groundbreaking works such …