Locating the Dis(located) Voices

Abstract

Locating the Dis(located) Voices Lydia Huerta Moreno (bio) Lxs academicxs del nort o leen las investigaciones locales, y la cosa es que hay una carencia de perspectiva—y luego se convierte en imperialismo academico. (Scholars of the north do not read the local scholarship, and the thing is that there is a lack of perspective—and then it becomes a practice of academic imperialism.) —Estefanía Bonilla Hernandez (translated by the author) In 1980 Toni Cade Bambara explained that it was time for women who were not included in conversations of feminism to find ways to build new connections, create a new set of recognitions, find new sources of power, and find new sites of accountability. Toni, along with Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, was extending us an invitation to come together against the barriers of inclusion that are erected against us to keep our voices contained or to silence.1 Women of color from the Global South have fought for decades to be included and to be located within academic conversations, to be cited, and to be credited as producers of knowledge. And while much has been achieved by the inclusion of women of color in academic discourse, there is still a lot of work to do to dismantle the structural dislocation of the voices of women of color, trans, and gender nonconforming people, both from the United States and the Global South (a term that in and of itself is quite exclusionary). The voices of these thinkers and their perspectives are invaluable and crucial for understanding transfeminist perspectives and global realities. The works in this issue aim to contribute diverse statements about positionalities, languages, and ways of knowing that are repeatedly undervalued, dismissed, essentialized, dislocated, and mislocated at conferences, in journals, and in spaces of conversations in and out of the academy. They also serve as a reminder of how ideologies like Manifest Destiny have adapted and transformed into the conquering of the legitimization and production of [End Page 28] knowledge. The philosopher Sayak Valencia explains in “Epistemopolíticas del Border” in this issue, “lxs Doctorxs Blancxs del Norte, quiénes no solo insisten en explicarnos nuestros mundos desde sus perspectivas, sesgos, y privilegios sino que además expropian y se apropian de nuestra producción de conocimiento y, tras blanquearlo, edulcorarlo, y despolitizarlo, nos devuelven nuestros conceptos en su idioma ‘sin acento,’ con copyright para citar según MLA o Chicago, como requisito principal para ingresar a un mundo de extractivismo académico que aún les rinde pleitesía.”2 Valencia’s critique embodies the extractive nature of the academe and scholars in the Global North as well as the ways in which publications, journals, and editors circulate specific types of knowledge by reproducing structural racists practices and xenophobic ideologies that reify American exceptionalism. They do this by entrenching the belief that in order for an idea to have value and legitimacy it must be written in English, and as a legitimate idea—it—cannot exist in the conceptual world of people outside the confines of the United States. For example, in November of 2019 I attended a session titled “Feminist Journal Editors’ Panel” at the National Women’s Studies Association’s (NWSA) annual conference in San Francisco. As a junior scholar it was alarming, if not anxiety inducing, to hear the editors of feminist-focused journals speak about their low acceptance rates, the process of publication, and the limitations of publishing texts in the original language. Some attendees asked questions about mentorship and how to engage in dialogues with other feminists transnationally and read feminists from other parts of the world in US journals. As I sat there I thought it was particularly ironic that these journals—which had been created as alternative spaces for publications that challenged the oppressive practices, and the xenophobic, patriarchal gatekeeping of top academic journals—had adopted the very same gatekeeping practices, often privileging learned experience over lived experience, and English and its writing structure over translated works or works in their original language. It was at this moment that I felt particularly grateful that a year before, at the 2018 NWSA conference at another panel on...