Antiracist Anger as Social and Moral Inquiry in Colectivo Ayllu's Devuélvannos el oro: Cosmovisiones perversas y acciones anticoloniales (2018)

Abstract

Abstract: My essay looks at how diasporic, racialized, and sexually-and gender dissident voices that collaborated with Colectivo Ayllu in their first year of residency at CRA Matadero Madrid (2017–18) approach antiracist activism from a decolonial feminist perspective that analyzes gender and sexuality in relation to race and coloniality. I analyze Devuélvannos el oro: Cosmovisiones perversas y acciones anticoloniales , a compilation of visual, poetic, and essayistic pieces curated by Ayllu that emerge from experiential and political reflections, as well as anticolonial actions developed during the group's residency. I read Ayllu's emancipatory thinking first within a view of decolonial epistemology that enacts situated notions of knowledge, beauty, and truth outside Eurocentric frameworks. I also bring to light a concurrent understanding of decolonized epistemology that permeates Devuélvannos 's project and allows for making normative truth claims about systems of inequality and human flourishing. I discuss the consequences of both (compatible) notions of decolonial epistemology in Ayllu's formulation of antiracism activism. My essay bridges critical lenses from postpositivist realist theories of identity, women of color feminism and decolonial feminism to the study of emotions as embodied forms of knowledge that may offer "clarity" and insight into how ideologies and structures of power operate in a society.