Notes Towards a Decolonial Praxis of Cultural Analysis Exemplarity and Listening as Other

In this essay we interrogate the object–frame–analyst relation-ship in cultural analysis from a decolonial perspective. Inspired by Gayatri Spivak and the modernity/coloniality school of decolonial thought, we critically examine several Eurocentric legacies inherent in the conceptual foundations of cultural analysis. However, instead of rejecting these inheritances, we explore ways to work with them with a decolonial intent. The essay calls for acknowledging the provinciality of cultural analysis’s current perspective, making room for alternative engagements between analyst and object, other perspectives on the object’s role as a case study, and additional ways of understanding alterity. We propose two directions for developing alternative conceptual frameworks: (1) underscoring the analyst’s own otherness to the object and (2) rethinking exemplarity in the object