Special Dossier: Toward Planetary Decolonial Feminisms
Introduction: Toward Planetary Decolonial Feminisms
Marcekke Maese-Cohen
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The title of this dossier honors the social activism and political philosophy of the coalitional project of decolonial feminisms. While those involved in this conversation have for the most part been located in geographical spaces regularly referred to as the United States and Latin America (particularly Bolivia and Mexico), the central question that motivates our solidarity—what does it mean, as Laura Pérez writes in her essay here, “to engage in decolonizing coalitions that take feminist queer of color critical thought seriously as central to the work of decolonization?”—is one that is necessarily posed between and beyond these reified time-spaces. The contributions to feminist thinking made in this dossier by scholar-activists working in and across the contexts of Bolivia, the United States, Korea, Japan, India, and France can perhaps best be understood as moving between the “post” and the “de” colonial; beyond the reification of our globe toward a version of what Gayatri Spivak has named planetarity. I put emphasis here on placing postcolonial studies in conversation with decoloniality, rather than “introducing” decolonial feminisms as a new and therefore more accurate or universal way of unthinking colonization. My aim is to defamiliarize postcolonial studies by “introducing” the project of decolonial feminisms as an open-ended question, “what does it mean to take feminist queer of color critical thought seriously?” rather than as a predetermined program disciplined by a rigid lexicon.
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The Notion of “Rights” and the Paradoxes of Postcolonial Modernity: Indigenous Peoples and Women in Bolivia
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This article attempts to undertake a reading of “gender” as it operates in Bolivia’s juridical history, in order to propose some issues of debate that I consider pertinent to any discussion of the “rights of indigenous peoples” and their close ties, at least as I see them, to “the rights of women” (whether indigenous, cholas, birlochas, or refinadas). First I focus on the masculine and lettered aspects of the juridical process that has produced the documents known as the Laws of the Republic. In Europe both the law and the modern historical formation of what is known as “public space” are anchored in the ideals of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, whereby the rebirth of the human being was implicitly imagined as a masculine Universal Subject, who was by nature a bearer of “rights.” Up to now the notion of “human rights” means nothing more than what were known as “the rights of man” (droits de l’homme) in the eighteenth century. Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler have noted this conflation, writing of a “phallogocentric” version of the modern Subject, the enlightened heterosexual individual. This representation of the modern individual has been inscribed in European history and imposed on the rest of the world over the course of the last two centuries through multiple processes of political, military, and cultural hegemony.
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Speaking at the Border/Will These Words Reach…
Cho Haejoang and Ueno Chizuko
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Cho Haejoang’s First Letter
You are traveling again, Chizuko
The person I know you to be has always been traveling, or with women who are traveling. And I am one of those women who travels with you. It always makes me feel both happy and heavy to think of you as a “nomadic woman intellectual,” who as a woman, for women, engages in women’s writing.
I read the letter you sent from Croatia all at once. Even without having been there, I can hear what you will have said in the lecture you gave with the title “Hiroshima from a Feminist Perspective: Between War Crimes and the Crime of War.” I can also see you with all your senses alert as you strained to see the reactions of your audience. You, who are always giving public lectures as you travel all over the world, possess conviction and passion that are astonishing.
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Enrique Dussel's Etica de la liberatión, U.S. Women of Color Decolonizing Practices, and Coalitionary Politics amidst Difference
Laura E. Pérez
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In its preliminary version this essay was written for a panel at the American Academy of Religion in honor of Enrique Dussel’s important and necessary work on the occasion of his seventieth birthday in 2004. Given that I am not a philosopher, theologian, or historian, all areas in which Dussel holds degrees and to which he has contributed prominently, and that I was then a newcomer to his work, I could only imagine that I was asked to join the panel of his specialists and collaborators in order to ensure that a U.S. feminist of color and queer-centered engagement with his work was represented. Various symposia and lectures by Enrique Dussel and Aníbal Quijano, organized by the Department of Ethnic Studies’ Chicana/o Latina/o Studies Program, had produced in me and another feminist colleague the impression that they knew little about the U.S. civil rights movements, and mainly about the African American struggles. They apparently knew nothing about the crucial feminist and queer contributions of U.S. women of color to the racial, gender, and sexual civil rights struggles. As these encounters were organized to explore intellectual bridge building in decolonial thought, as a woman of color, my own concern was not only to engage their thought as potentially useful to new transnational resistance movements, but also to clarify what our movements had discovered, either in parallel fashion or differently than leftist intellectuals and popular movements from the 1960s to the present in Latin America.
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Decolonial Praxis: Enabling Intranational and Queer Coalition Building
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MAESE-COHEN
Can we start from the beginning? Where are you from? And I ask that in the most respectful and intersubjective way possible, not in the migra or border patrol way—“where were you born?”—but as a way of situating knowledge, the way that Anzaldúa speaks of the importance of naming yourself, both for the agency of the speaker and for the possibility of coalition work.
BACCHETTA
Thank you, Marcelle. I was born in New York into a heterosexual family that was mixed nationally, culturally, and in terms of its racialization and morphologies. My grandparents converged out of Italy, Venezuela, and farther back Turkey, and even farther back northeastern Africa. I’ve lived most of my life in Paris, in India, and in Italy, before settling in the U.S. again in adulthood. These spaces, various languages, the forms of hybridity of which I am comprised and in which I’m immersed, my specific morphology and how it is perceived in the contexts in which I live, the sometimes conflicting and sometimes overlapping grids of intelligibility in which I’ve been formed, through which I have been framed, but also through which and in relation to which I inevitably make sense of the world, my specific type of accumulation of knowledge, my sense of critique, the way theory and practice get linked in my life—perhaps these sites and frames help to locate me for you?
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Articles
Theory in Black: Teleological Suspensions in Philosophy of Culture
Lewis R. Gordon
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My aim in this essay is to explore some challenges in the philosophy of culture that emerge from its often repressed but symbiotic relationship with what Enrique Dussel calls “the underside of modernity.” Philosophy of culture and its forms in various disciplines of the human sciences have often avowed French, Germanic, and Scottish roots, through a repression or denial not only of the African, Native American, and Oceanic peoples who function as sources of taxonomical anxiety but also of such sources from “within,” so to speak; Spanish influences, for instance, with their resources from Jewish and Muslim social worlds, acquired a peripheral status. Throughout, as I have shown in An Introduction to Africana Philosophy, there have been those who thought otherwise, and their stories reveal the centering of the question of “man” in the modern world in a movement that led from his definition to his conditions of possibility. To study these conditions calls for identifying the subject of study, the main difficulty in studying such a subject, and the reasoning behind such claims. In studying culture we study the being or beings that create culture, which, drawing upon the work of Ernst Cassirer, I argue is a phenomenon marked by a transition from signification to symbol.
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On Racial Fetishism
David Marriott
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Let me suggest provisionally that fetishism (or at least its structure) always has to do with repudiation and loss. That it commemorates a loss, but a loss that is simultaneously recognized and denied (perhaps it is recognition that is denied?), by substituting a sign, a sign that preserves the loss it effaces like ice preserves the muddy footprints of passersby. And that, reciprocally, the knowledge and belief that sustain fetishism always run the risk of falling prey to doubt, so that as soon as the subject ventures into it, it runs the risk of finding itself somewhere it would rather not be.
Frantz Fanon claims in Black Skin, White Masks that it is in the fetishism analyzed both by Freud and by Marx—or rather, where this analysis breaks down—that the psychopolitical dimensions of racial antagonism most needs to be thought. One imagines that such thought (especially if it were to turn out to be a case of precarious redoubt), has a complex structure that is difficult to pin down. My working hypothesis here, in what is rather speculative, is that this structure must have at least an antinomian relation with the structure of the fetish as Freud and Marx present it, and especially in the distinction between illusion and loss, acknowledgment and disavowal, phantasm and reality. Moreover, we shall see that antinomy is also part of our problem and, as such, cannot solve the problem of the fetish.
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Affekt, Gefühl, Empfindung: Rereading Freud on the Question of Unconscious Affects
Adrian Johnston
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If, as Aristotle famously declares in the Metaphysics, wonder is the source driving philosophizing, then a further specification should be immediately added to this: wonder, a compelling, captivating feeling that is experienced as a light, gentle yearning or exhilaration, is the affective motor behind the speculative endeavors of theoretical philosophy. That is to say, if wonder is a fundamental philosophical affect, it’s fundamental primarily to those parts of philosophy moved principally by a “desire to understand” (epistemology, ontology, metaphysics, logic, etc.). But, what about the significant other dimension of philosophy? In other words, what about practical philosophy (ethics, politics, etc.) as concerned not so much with “What can I know?” but rather with “What should I do?” Guilt is one of the main candidates for being to practical philosophy what wonder is to theoretical philosophy, namely, a foundational affect as a catalyst for the deliberations, decisions, and deeds of concern to philosophy’s prescriptions.
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What is Trauma to the Future? On Glissant's Poetics
John E. Drabinski
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In “The Formation of Intellectuals,” Antonio Gramsci writes:
It can be seen that the “organic” intellectuals which each new class creates with itself and elaborates in its own progressive development are for the most part “specializations” of partial aspects of the primitive activity of the new social type which the new class has brought to light.
The question of individual and collective identity is at stake in these remarks. Intellectual work, on Gramsci’s account, is both self-articulation and collective transformation. That is to say, the function of the intellectual is both to articulate the un(der)articulated inner-life of a class and to begin with nearly nothing. The intellectual, at least potentially, both transforms and creates the relation of subaltern classes to history—that is, to their muted history. This relation is always something new and so is a characteristic that differentiates the transformative creator, the “organic intellectual,” from the bourgeois institution of “the thinker.” Whereas the institution of the intellectual (professor, politician, labor organizer) reifies the given ideology of the ruling corporative class—buttressing what Althusser will later call ideological state apparatuses—the organic intellectual begins with another, perhaps “counter,” promise: the future.
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Haunted Lives: AIDS and the Future of Our Past
Didier Eribon
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When I read Alan Hollinghurst’s recent novel, The Line of Beauty, I was struck by its final page. The protagonist, knowing he has AIDS, asks himself if, after he has passed away, he will live on in his friends’ memories. He envisions these friends waking in the morning, a ghostly image of his face briefly crossing their minds, as they prepare to throw themselves into their daily routine; or he imagines them reading a recently published book, bemoaning, with a sadness that fades as the years pass, the fact that he did not live long enough to be able to discover its contents. The hallucinated visions of this young man who confronts the imminence of his own death while projecting into the future the presence of his own absence taught me an obvious truth about myself that perhaps had never before been so apparent to me: up to the present—alas, for a good twenty-five years, or maybe more—I have found and continue to find myself in the very situation in which the young protagonist envisions his friends as he wonders if they will remember him once he is gone. Of course, insomuch as I belong to a generation of gays who were stricken by AIDS at the very beginning of the epidemic, before we even knew its nature or how to protect ourselves or others from it, I have long considered myself to be a survivor, someone who is fortunate enough to have escaped infection. Here, then, is what I take from Hollinghurst’s book, or at least what his book has helped me to formulate: my life is haunted by those whom the disease took away—by those, more precisely, whom I managed to survive.
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“We're Only Making Plans for Nigel”: In Response to Didier Eribon
Elizabeth Freeman
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I would like to begin with the keyword that haunts Professor Didier Eribon’s lyrical and tenacious piece: survival. Colloquially, to survive is to live on—when others do not. Often, this connotes living on unchanged, as in the survival of vestigial organs in the body. It can suggest triumphing over, as in surviving cancer. Survival can also imply a reduction of life to its barest elements, as in, “She survived the car accident, but she remains in a coma.”
But the etymology of the word survive ghosts it with other possible meanings. Of course, it comes from the Latin vivere, “to live.” But the prefix super-, from which “sur” is derived, means “above, on the top (of), beyond, besides, in addition.” Thus there are echoes of something else, something above life, atop it, beyond it, besides it, in addition to it.
This suggests that surviving, making it through something like the first wave of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, puts something else atop or beside our own lives. Once we live and someone else does not, as Professor Eribon makes clear, something is making a claim upon us. We are changed. What emerges is neither the same person “before,” nor a wholly new person “after,” but a person haunted by the dead. Derrida calls it “being-with-specters,” and I think Professor Eribon lives with the dead in this way.
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Cover: Miwa Yanagi, My Grandmothers/Mineko, 2002. More info.
Volume 18.2 is available at Duke University Press, Project Muse, and JSTOR. Qui Parle is edited by an independent group of graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and published by Duke University Press.