Decolonial Feminism: From Anti-Colonial Feminism to Contemporary Tools for Liberation

This course considers the significant contradiction of feminism: it relies on a colonial framing of gender. We offer an account of feminism from First Nation women, African women, Black women, Women of Colour and, to a lesser extent, white settler-colonial and European women. Our aim is twofold. First, to unpack the relationship between feminism, colonialism and gender by drawing from the insights of prominent Afro-feminist scholars like Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí and Sylvia Tamale, First Nation scholars such as Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Goenpul) and Lee Maracle, and other anti-colonial feminists like Silvia Federici and María Lugones. Second to show how feminism as a politics can respond to multiple, interconnected systems of oppression. We also look at the critical writing of bell hooks, Achille Mbembe, Audre Lorde, Akwugo Emejulu, María Lugones, Patricia Hill Collins, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and others. And we consider a range of strategies–feminist and otherwise–these, and other, writers offer, such as refusal, resistance, rest, play, joy, opacity, and relationality to push back against the “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”

LECTURE ONE - THE COLONIALITY OF GENDER: ADDRESSING THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

In the first session, we set the stage by unpacking the terms ‘Afro-feminism’, ‘Black feminism’, ‘Indigenous feminism’, ‘Women of Colour feminism’ and ‘decolonial feminism’ to see why these feminist experiences and sensibilities reject white western feminism’s tendency toward a “one-size-fits-all” approach. In this way we highlight the diversity of women’s experiences across cultures and histories. The explication of these terms serve as a segue into a close consideration of the arguments in Oyĕwùmí’s The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, and Tamale’s Decolonisation and Afro-Feminism, highlighting their conceptual frameworks and implicit points of reference. This analysis is supplemented by an explication of T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting’s Negritude Women and Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms, and Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason to see how these scholars provided the important philosophical and literary critiques that challenged and reshaped understanding of Black identity, thought and feminism. Having moved through these texts, we see how colonialism’s gendered impact, which included the imposition of rigid European gender norms and patriarchal systems, disrupted and often erased pre-colonial gender systems that were more fluid and balanced.  

RECOMMENDED READINGS

• Fanon, F. (1965). Preface and Algeria Unveiled. In A Dying Colonialism (pp. 23-68). New York: Grove Press.
• Lugones, M. (2016). The Coloniality of Gender. In W. Harcourt (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development : Critical Engagements in Feminist Theory and Practice (pp. 13-33). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Oyěwùmí, O. (1997). Preface and Introduction. In The Invention of Women : Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (pp. ix-30). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Tamale, S. (2020). Some Key Definitions and Introduction. In Decolonization and Afro-feminism (pp. xiii-16). Ottawa: Daraja Press.
• Tuck, E., & Yang, W. K. (2012). Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1-40. doi:10.25058/20112742.n38.04.

LECTURE TWO - ON BALANCE: FIRST NATIONS and COLONIAL FEMINISM

This lecture returns to the idea of balance in pre-colonial social systems. Here we start with the work of Kombumerri philosopher Mary Graham who teaches us about the important role balance played, and continues to play, in sustaining healthy and fair social relations in many First Nations communities. We also take a brief look at what we can know about pre-colonial social relations in Turtle Island (North America) from Cherokee scholar Virginia Carney. Turning our minds back to more contemporary times we consider the critique of white feminism by Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson in her book Talkin’ Up to the White Woman and her article ‘Towards and Australian Indigenous Women’s Standpoint Theory’. We also reflect on the work of Lee Maracle, an Indigenous Canadian writer and academic of the Stó꞉lō nation and a text by the  Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Ultimately we acknowledge that the experience of First Nation women is incommensurable to that of white, settler-colonial women, so we wrap up this session with a discussion about this incommensurability.

RECOMMENDED READING

• Bufardeci, L. (2024). “What to Do?”. In Tacking and a Tacktical Methodology: Moving Towards a Different Politics for Art (pp. 22-56). Leiden: Brill.
• Carney, V. (2001). Nanye'hi and Kitteuha: War Women of the Cherokee. In B. A. Mann (Ed.), Native American Speakers of the Eastern Woodlands (pp. 123-143). Westport: Greenwood Press.
• Graham, M. (1999). Some Thoughts About the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews. Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture and Ecology, 3(2), 105-118. doi:10.1163/156853599X00090
• Maracle, L. (1996). The Women’s Movement. In I Am Woman: A Native’s Perspective on Sociology and Feminism. Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers.
• Moreton-Robinson, A. (2020). Introduction. In Talkin' up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism (pp. xxi-xxxi). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
• Simpson, L. B. (2017). Kwe as Resurgent Method. In As We Have Always Done (pp. 27-38): University of Minnesota Press.

LECTURE THREE - AFRO-FEMINISM AND INTERSECTIONALITY

In this session we discuss the concept of ‘Intersectionality’, and its connection with Afro-feminism in Africa, Brazil and America. We consider how an intersectional approach to feminism critiques a single-axis framework, as well as recognises that the solutions to any racial and gendered oppression must address the multiple layers of oppression simultaneously, as opposed to isolating race or gender as distinct categories. By connecting Afro-feminism to intersectionality, this lecture helps us to understand how the two frameworks create a more complex and holistic approach to gender justice that recognises and addresses the complexities of women’s experiences. We also discuss a range of Black feminists’ theorising from the United States. Through analysing the work of theorists like bell hooks, Audre Lorde and Patricia Hill Collins, we see how the survival of Black women’s theorising in the face of epistemic and ontological inflictions imposed by systems of oppression comes from a range of practices. These include resisting and disrupting the varied oppressions that have marginalised their narratives and voices and through shaping stories of their ways of knowing and being that are grounded in their experiences, histories and aspirations. Our aim is to examine the nuance and depth of Black feminist theories to discern how they have created alternative pathways toward liberation and self-determination.

RECOMMENDED READINGS

• African Feminist Forum. (2016). Charter of Feminist Principle for African Feminists. Retrieved from https://www.africanfeministforum.com/feminist-charter-introduction
• Collins, P. H. (1989). The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 14(4), 745-773. doi:10.1086/494543
• Collins, P. H., & Bilge, S. (2020). What is Intersectionality? In Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Combahee River Collective. (1983). A Black Feminist Statement. In C. Moraga & G. Anzaldua (Eds.), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (pp. 210-218). Albany: SUNY Press.
• Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241-1299.
• hooks, b. (1991). Theory as Liberatory Practice. Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 4, 1-12. 
• Lorde, A. (1984). Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg: Crossing Press.
• Othieno, C. A., & Davis, A., on behalf of Mwasi Collectif. (2019). Those Who Fight for Us without Us Are against Us: Afrofeminist Activism in France. In A. Emejulu & F. Sobande (Eds.), To Exist Is to Resist: Black Feminism in Europe (pp. 46-62). London: Pluto Press.

LECTURE FOUR - BREAKING FREE AND THINKING NEW: TOWARDS A DECOLONIAL FEMINISM

Having considered what is integral to the global Black feminists’ framework, in this session we look at different ways to imagine a world where both gender and colonial domination can be totally dismantled. In other words, given how global Black feminism is still mired in coloniality and collusion, this lecture zeros in on Audre Lorde’s argument that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Here we consider the complexity of the concept of ‘decolonisation’ and look at the way that concept has spurred creative and substantial responses to the problem of colonial patriarchy.

RECOMMENDED READINGS

• Alcoff, L. M. (2019). Decolonizing Feminist Theory: Latina Contributions to the Debate. In A. J. Pitts, M. Ortega, & J. Medina (Eds.), Theories of the Flesh: Latinx and Latin American Feminisms, Transformation, and Resistance(pp. 11-28). New York: Oxford Academic.
• Lorde, A. (2018 [1979]). The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House. In. London: Penguin Books.
• Lugones, M. 2010. Towards a Decolonial Feminism. Hypatia vol. 25, no. 4(742-759).
• Tuck, E., & Yang, W. K. (2012). Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1-40. doi:10.25058/20112742.n38.04
• Vergès, F., & Bohrer, A. J. (2021). ‘Preface’, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, ‘1. Taking Sides: Decolonial Feminism’ (A. J. Bohrer, Trans.). In A Decolonial Feminism. London: Pluto Press.

LECTURE FIVE - THE TOOLS FOR TOTAL LIBERATION

In this session we discuss the tools for liberation offered to everyone by Afro-feminists, Indigenous feminists and Black feminists and others. These tools are sometimes similar to those of white, western feminism, but more often they are very different. They include consciousness raising (Anzaldúa), play (Lugones), joy and pleasure (Lorde), opacity (Glissant), rest (Hersey), refusal (Campt), futurity (Karera), queerness (Hammonds), abolition (Davis), care (Hayes & Kaba), listening (Gumbs) and relationality (Graham and Dudgeon & Bray). Taken into the world, these tools prove it is necessary to build with a multiplicity of tools and in a multiplicity of ways in order to truly find a way beyond what bell hooks calls the “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”

RECOMMENDED READINGS

• Anzaldúa, G. (2013). Now Let Us Shift . . . The Path of Conocimiento . . . Inner Work, Public Acts. In G. Anzaldúa & A. Keating (Eds.), This Bridge We Call Home : Radical Visions for Transformation. London: Taylor & Francis Group.
• Campt, T. M. (2019). Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal. Women & Performance: a Journal of Feminist Theory, 29(1), 79-87.  
• Davis, A. Y., Dent, G., Meiners, E., R., & Richie, B., E. (2022). Introduction. In Abolition. Feminism. Now.Chicago: Haymarket Books.
• Dudgeon, P., & Bray, A. (2019). Indigenous Relationality: Women, Kinship and the Law. Genealogy, 3 (23), 1-11. doi:10.3390/genealogy3020023
• Glissant, E. (1997). For Opacity (B. Wing, Trans.). In Poetics of Relation (pp. 189-194). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
• Graham, M. (2014). Aboriginal Notions of Relationality and Positionalism: A Reply to Weber. Global Discourse, 4(1), 17-22. doi:10.1080/23269995.2014.895931
• Gumbs, A. P. (2020). One: Listen. In Undrowned : Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals. Edinburgh: AK Press.
• Hammonds, E. (1994). Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality. differences, 6 (2-3), 126-145. doi:10.1215/10407391-6-2-3-126
• Hayes, K., & Kaba, M. (2023). Care Is Fundamental. In Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
• Hersey, T. (2022). Preface. In Rest Is Resistance : A Manifesto (pp. 8-11). New York: Little, Brown Spark.
• Karera, A. (2019). Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics. Critical Philosophy of Race, 7 (1), 32-56. doi:10.5325/critphilrace.7.1.0032
• Lorde, A. (1984). Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg: Crossing Press.
• Lugones, M. (1987). Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception. Hypatia, 2(2), 3-19. 
• Morgan, J. (2015). Why We Get Off: Moving Towards a Black Feminist Politics of Pleasure. The Black Scholar, 45(4), 36-46.