Gesturing Within the Colonial Library, Writing on Flusser’s Typewriter: Thinking as it Reveals Itself

This article brings Vilém Flusser and Valentin-Yves Mudimbe into discussion to explore the entanglements of technology, gesture, and knowledge production within colonial and post-historical contexts. Drawing on Mudimbe’s concept of the colonial library and Flusser’s phenomenology of the gesture, it argues that both thinkers grapple with the mediated conditions under which subjectivity and freedom are articulated. While Mudimbe seeks to re-write himself within and against the colonial library, Flusser examines how technical apparatuses—such as the typewriter—both constrain and make possible new forms of thought and expression. By examining their overlapping concerns with mediation, expression, and the apparatuses that shape human becoming, the article analyses the gesture of writing and re-writing as a critical tactic for decolonial media practice. Rather than aiming for a total escape from colonial or technological conditioning, the article suggests that working within constraints—re-writing, mediating, and (re)inventing—offers openings toward epistemological transparency and decolonial futures.