De-colonial feminism as a critique of modernity.

Decolonial feminism as a critique of modernity.

Introduction My epistemological position: Since we have been studying that we must not remain under the illusion of a zero point epistemology, I wish to clarify my epistemological position before I start the essay. I am a woman of color coming from a middle class, upper caste, ‘modern’ (non-conservative) family in a previously colonized country. For the majority part of my life I had never been looked at as a knowledge maker. As students we were taught to never question, always agree with the textbook and give the teacher/parent the last word. It has been but recently, in my Masters education in feminism and gender that I was taught to ask why and question the world around and within me. At this moment, being part of a ‘global classroom’ in the west, my assumptions and ideas have been standing on edge and the critical self in me has more food for thought. And yet I am struggling with the realization that my ideas and thoughts are ‘valid’ and ‘important’ in an academic setting. I will begin this essay with a brief explanation of the eurocentric idea of modernity and the coloniality of being. Next, I will explore the non-western critiques of this idea by delving deeper into politics of knowledge, epistemic disobedience, resistance from the fractured locus, epistemologies of the south and epistemic interculturality. Throughout, I will simultaneously weave in decolonial feminism to show how it complements and extends these critiques. In my conclusion, I push my argument further to suggest that not only does decolonial feminism complement and extend non-western critiques of modernity but it is in itself a non western critique of

modernity.

‘Modernity’ as a western construction The Eurocentric idea of modernity confounds that the idea of ‘modernity’ is in itself a western construction. Modernity as a concept was born in 1492 but it was born in relation to the other. This other was the one that Europe encountered when it first went out exploring different parts of the world. Upon this encounter, the other was judged as uncivilized and barbaric thereby beginning the ‘civilizing mission’. This so called civilizing mission was in fact a euphemism to extreme violence and brutality on the colonies in an attempt to 1 erase difference and diversity. “So, if 1492 is the moment of the ‘birth’ of modernity as a concept, the moment also marks the origin of a process of concealment or misrecognition of the non-European” (Dussel, 1993). Under the guise of emancipation and modernity a new way of being was imposed upon the colonies. The logic of modernity puts everything into hierarchical and/or dichotomous categories. For instance, Maria Lugones asserts that modern colonial systems brought and imposed the gender system in colonies that didn’t previously have such classifications. Not only were the colonies given the categories of male and female, but they were also handed down, the hierarchies apparent in these gendered terms; Man as perfect, strong and intellectual vs Woman as imperfect, docile, pure and obedient. Western ideas of modernity and civilized society were imposed upon the

colonized. This imposition was carried out through an active process of dehumanization that involved turning the colonized against themselves and erasing their memories. “The civilizing transformation justified the colonization of memory, and thus of people’s senses of self, of intersubjective relation, and of their relation to the spirit world, to land, to the very fabric of their conception of reality, identity, and social, ecological, and cosmological organization” (Lugones, 2010). This process of dehumanization is what Maria Lugones calls as the coloniality of being. This coloniality of being remains tied to the fate of the colonized even today. As Edward Said elucidates when he paraphrases Fanon: “The experience of being colonized [...] did not end [...] when the last policeman left and the last European flag came down. [...]. To have been colonized was a fate with lasting, indeed grotesquely unfair results” (Said, 1989).

Transcendence through subalternity: Non-western critiques of modernity. Such a fate as described by Said, can be transcended only st through decolonizing. And decolonizing in the 21 century starts with epistemic disobedience. As Walter Mignolo (2009) articulates, in order to decolonize being, we must first decolonize knowledge. He suggests that this can be achieved through epistemic disobedience. By epistemic disobedience he means that we must delink from ‘zeropoint’ epistemology, which assumes that the knowing subject or the knowledge maker comes from a detached or neutral point.

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“The task of decolonial thinking is the unveiling of epistemic silences of western epistemology and affirming the epistemic rights of the racially devalued” (Mignolo, 2009). Through the politics of representation (who can represent whom) the west has achieved a sort of an epistemological hegemony over the rest of the world. In this picture most of the knowledge in produced in the North. The South is a source of knowledge, such that the anthropologists from the North come to the South to study the other. South has the experience but North makes knowledge. The flow knowledge always goes from North to South and most epistemologies of the south are not even considered to be ‘knowlegdes’ either because they are considered of inferior quality or because they are too ‘subjective’. In doing so these knowledges are actively produced to be non- existent (Santos, 2012). The anthropologist (from the north) is always the ‘Ideal’ who defines the other in relation to himself. In order to break this hegemony Mignolo urges us to de-westernize and decolonize. “Decolonial options have one aspect in common with dewesternizing arguments: The definitive rejection of ‘being told’ from the epistemic privileges of the zero point what ‘we’ are, what our ranking is in relation to the ideal of the humanitas and what we have to do to be recognized as such” (Mignolo, 2009). The non-western idea of modernity must be constructed

outside the framework of the west. Only then, will the social location of the other come into the idea of this new modernity. Following Partha Chaterjee’s argument to “clear up a space where we might become the creators of ‘our own modernity’– ‘our’ modernity which is not only ‘independent from ‘their’ modernity but one which is unrepentantly, unashamedly, impenitently ‘ours’” (Chatterjee, 1998). This is necessary also because; the categorical logic of western modernity does not have the tools to bring in the axis of intersectionality. To illustrate: If seen from the lens of western dichotomy, a ‘black woman’ is not a category of description. She gets lost in the category – ‘black’ or ‘woman’, in both the categories she is less important than someone – in the category ‘black’ she is less important than the black man and in the category ‘woman’ she is less important than the white woman. She lies in the fractured locus, which is doubly perceived, which relates doubly and where the sides of the locus are in tension with each other (Lugones, 2010). For this reason, it is important to resist from within the fractured locus and make sense of the contradiction. Resisting from the fractured locus creates a tension between the subjectification(forming of the subject) and subjectivity(agency required for the oppressingßßààresisting relation to become an active one) relation. “As such it places the theorizer in the midst of people in a historical, peopled, subjective/intersubjective understanding of the oppressing 3 ßßààresisting relation at the intersection of complex systems of oppression”(Ibid).

In locating the theorizer it gets rid of the illusion of the zero point epistemology and at once sees how the abasement called coloniality gives us a dual rendition of life. The main task of decolonial feminism is to see the colonial difference and resist the epistemological habit of erasing it. This is achieved by ensuring location, historicity and an incarnate intersubjectivity in creating epistemology from the South. But just as we are aware of the Eurocentricism of the North we have be aware not to construct one epistemology of the South. We have to be conscious that even in the South there are infinite ways of thinking, and being and behaving that are worlds apart from each other. Despite the communality of having the experience of being colonized, the ways in which different Souths experience oppression can be very varied and thus, the knowledges that emerge from these will and must be diverse. Also it is important to note that it is not only the experience of oppression that produces knowledges. Many of these cultures have been there way before ‘western modernity’ and have way infinite ways of relating not only to the human world, but also beyond. “[...] Therefore we do not need alternatives; we need rather alternative thinking of the alternatives” (Santos, 2012). Creation of epistemologies of the South can be done in four steps – Sociology of absences, sociology of emergences, ecology of knowledge and intercultural translation. In thinking of alternatives we have to be aware about what we choose to leave out of the realm of knowledge and why. This is what the sociology of absence is about – everything that is nonexistent is made actively so. The sociology of emergences looks at what is present and adds possibilities and expectations for the future to it. The ecology of knowledge

talks about infinite knowledges and infinite ignorances. Every time we learn something new, an ignorance is erased, and we have a little more knowledge, but in gaining a knowledge we also gain an ignorance. The utopia would be learning about other knowledges without forgetting our own. And finally intercultural translation involves a mutual exchange of experiences amongst people the world (Santos, 2012). Intercultural translation is important for furthering the cause of resistance, to share experiences between the south that allows for spaces of communality because after all resistance never happens in isolation. This is also why, decolonial feminism propagates a coalition for resistance - A coalition that respects difference and encourages multiplicity. It understands that there is difference and instead of feeling threatened by the difference it sees the possibility and the plenitude of the difference in turn strengthening the Abya yala philosophy – which is the logic conceived in and thought from difference, not only the colonial difference but also the ancestral difference that existed before colonization, and places us exterior to the continental model. Such is the idea of epistemic interculturality, which requires a fundamental transformation in the way we think and see the world (Walsh, 2012). A similar transformation is also required in the practice of decolonial feminism. 4 Foundation  1110  5 420951sm

Decolonial feminism requires a transformation of the social

through a lived critique the racialized, capitalist, heterosexualist oppression. However this critique is enacted not through focusing on demonizing the oppressor but through furthering logic of coalition and multiplicity. “The direction of the possibility of strengthening the affirmation and possibility of self in relation lies not through a rethinking of the relation with the oppressor from the point of the oppressed, but through a furthering of the logic of difference and multiplicity and of coalition at the point of difference”(Lugones, 2010 paraphrasing Lorde, 2007).

Conclusion The logic of coalition opposes the logic of Eurocentric modernity. Modernity denies existence to other (different) worlds and this denial is coloniality. In coalitions differences are not seen as dichotomies, hence their multiplicity is never reduced. In seeing equality within differences, decolonial feminist coalition aims to also erase hierarchy in the multiplicity. Throughout the essay we have seen the many ways in which decolonial feminism weaves into the rhetoric of different non-western critiques of modernity, thus, complementing these critiques. While most of these critiques talk about creating knowledges and epistemologies, decolonial feminism urges us to enact a critique of the radicalized, capitalist, heterosexualist oppression as a lived transformation of the social (Lugones, 2010). Herein lies the difference in decolonial feminism. While other critiques push us to change epistemology, decolonial feminism insists that we change ourselves, and hence I conclude that decolonial feminism not only complements and extends non-western critiques of modernity but is in itself one of the strongest critiques of the same.

**** 5 References: Chatterjee, Partha (1998) ‘Talking about Our Modernity in Two Languages’, in A Possible India: Essays in Political Criticism. Calcutta: Oxford University Press. Dussel, Enrique 1993, 'Eurocentrism and Modernity' (Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures) in boundary 2, Vol 20 (3): 65-76. Lugones, María 2010, 'Toward a Decolonial Feminism' in Hypatia Vol 25 (4):742-759 Mignolo, Walter 2009, 'Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom' in Theory Culture Society Vol 26 (7-8): 159-181. Said, Edward 1989, 'Representing the Colonized' in Critical Inquiry Vol 15(2): 205-225 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa 2012, 'Public Sphere and Epistemologies of the South', in Africa Development Vol XXXVII(1):43-67. Walsh, Catherine 2012, '"Other" Knowledges, "Other" Critiques: Reflections on the Politics and Practices of Philosophy and Decoloniality in the "Other" America; in Transmodernity 1(3): 11-27 6