Decolonial Praxis Research Articles

Kateri’s Bones: Recovering an Indigenous Political Ecology of Healing along Kaniatarowanenneh, 1660–1701

The extraordinarily well-documented life of St. Kateri Tekakwitha and the “afterlives” of her physical remains are analyzed through the theoretical lens of a “political ecology of healing”—a framework emphasizing the interplay of ecosystems and decolonial praxis within historically colonized spaces. Investigating Indigenous political ecologies from the colonial archives of New France recovers the ways Native women maintained sovereign communities in their riverine homelands in an era of climate change, colonial invasion, and internecine violence during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Placing Indigenous women, their kinship networks, and their relationship with their ancestral lands at the center of decolonial history shows how Native communities along Kaniatarowanenneh—the St. Lawrence River— represented sites of Native resilience and regeneration rather than decline and dependence. Native women established a syncretistic religion devoted to Kateri’s memory that mapped Catholic rituals on traditional Indigenous ecological knowledge and practices. This Indigenous spirituality remained distinct from the devotional cult European American colonizers erected around Kateri, and it persisted after settlers forgot her. After more than three centuries, Kateri’s bones remain at Kahnawá:ke Mohawk Territory as a testimony to an unbroken history of Indigenous power, presence, and care for the land. Contemporary Indigenous movements for sovereignty, self-determination, and environmental justice have their origins in the political ecology of healing embodied by Kateri’s bones.

Haki/pláticas ∼ testimonios/shahadat: Arabyya feminista decolonial praxis

The authors share how their Arabyyat and Chicana feminist pedagogies and methodologies, haki/pláticas ∼ testimonios/shahadat, contribute to a decolonial praxis. We center haki/pláticas ∼ testimonios/shahadat and introduce what we term as “Arabyya feminista decolonial praxis” in education as an act of linguistic and epistemic disobedience. Our work, pedagogies and methodologies, advance the esthetic dimensions of our Arabyya feminista praxis. We delineate how in merging theory and practice is intuitively guided by our her/histories, sensibilities, and ways of being for/with each other. Coming from la Mirada al Sur, our transnational collaboration is captured in our testimonios/shahadat and displayed in the poetics and art that sprung via our haki/pláticas. We conclude that this work is needed more than ever and with a brief analysis of the esthetics of these methodologies as our Arabyya feminista decolonial praxis.

Decolonizing the Curriculum? Transformation, Emotion, and Positionality in Teaching

Decolonizing the curriculum involves more than broadening the canon and revising reading lists. In challenging Eurocentric frameworks and making definitions of “fashion” more inclusive, methods and approaches to teaching itself also require active reconceptualization in a closer questioning of the meaning of decolonized practice. This paper analyses experimental teaching within the MA History of Design program at the Royal College of Art, London, which aimed to explore decolonial praxis while training postgraduates to critique fashion historiography. The ambition was also to broaden students’ perspectives toward deeper reflexivity and wider professional development. We argue that the dismantling of Eurocentric bias and critiquing of institutional systems involves an uncomfortable unpicking of accustomed structures of knowledge that is both the ground zero and the end goal of decolonial histories. In modeling more collaborative modes of teaching, learning and writing, we suggest what a decolonized practice could look like for fashion studies, and the importance of emotion and position within a transformational potential.

Sink or swim? Responsible situated agency constructed by socioeconomically underprivileged students of English in neoliberal Brazil

This article discusses the results of a four-year investigation on the neoliberal challenges faced by socioeconomically underprivileged students in Brazil who were majoring in English teaching. It is a qualitative study that employs the concept of language as a sociocultural and dialogical practice as well as the concepts of responsibility and agency; it also examines the relationship between these students’ experiences and neoliberalism as seen in language education. The data generated by questionnaires, students’ essays, and semi-structured interviews reveal that the participants’ initiatives to engage themselves in outside classroom interactions acted as counter-centralizing forces. By exercising their responsible situated agency towards their English language appropriation process, these participants react against neoliberal challenges viewed here as hierarchical centripetal forces that constrain their access to different kinds of capital. The study participants are also guided by the agency of spaces promoted by discourses marked by decolonial thinking; however, though these students find different ways to negotiate neoliberal challenges, it is still crucial that the faculty in charge of the investigated context build on existing decolonial practices in the classroom. In doing so, more students can become part of “discursive actions” that foster their responsible situated agency towards a more egalitarian society.

Curating Fashion as Decolonial Practice: Ndwalane’s Mblaselo and a Politics of Remembering

In this article, I discuss the curatorial moment in a museum that rendered a pair of embellished trousers in a new light, and what acts of giving space to an object and its story can do to rewrite a range of narratives, including global fashion histories, diverse cultural voices, museal collections and the extent of ongoing archival violence. I draw on a seminal South African fashion exhibition that I curated in 2019 at the Zeitz MOCAA museum, titled 21 YEARS: Making Histories with South African Fashion Week. In conjunction with the exhibition, we convened workshops and talks as part of the exhibition’s public program that used decolonial strategies to invite greater diversity and participation for an expanded range of inclusion. This article follows the complex, largely disavowed social, historical, and political histories stored in the seams of one fashion object—a pair of well-worn and patched jeans—that are activated when recontextualized within the value-laden, knowledge-production museum field.

Decolonising MOS as Praxis and an Other Critical Performativity

This paper presents the findings of an action research and team-based authoethnographic research project aimed at decolonizing current debates on critical performativity. The literatures on critical performativity and decolonizing management and organizational knowledge have developed in parallel, offering us the opportunity to investigate the nexus of the two. We first identify the Eurocentric conditions of possibility of critical performativity and CMS, and as disruption of these epistemic limits, propose the notion of decolonial praxis as an ‘other’ (pun intended) performativity. We unpack this idea empirically by drawing upon qualitative data and participant and organizer reflections on an academic workshop (co-organized by the authors) held in South Africa on the topic of decolonizing management and organizational knowledge. Our thematic findings draw attention to the embodied, affective nature of such decolonial praxis, as well as the importance of ‘knowing’ and ‘doing things’ with a double consciousness. Organized under two key themes (connected borderlands; phronetic border thinking/doing), these findings enable us to specify some conceptual features of decolonizing (management) practice that exist beyond colonial difference, and to draw out practical implications for management academics and Business Schools seeking to pursue a decolonial agenda.

Time-space politics and heritagisation in Africa: understanding where to begin decolonisation

ABSTRACT This paper reflects on how heritage knowledge is built around time-space discourses. It takes a Critical Heritage Studies (CHS) position to examine heritage knowledge systems through the lenses of Walter Mignolo’s decolonial praxis on ‘locus of enunciation’ and Tim Ingold’s exegesis on ‘dwelling perspectives’. Drawing from ethnographic evidence collected among the Igbo of Nigeria, the study engages Indigenous concepts and heritage ontologies in the context of time and space in heritage making in Africa. Secondly, it interrogates the evidence with the continuity that occurs in society through intergenerational knowledge systems that began with known ancestors. Thirdly, such sustainability mechanisms are examined using what I call ‘territorial communion’ – the ways in which those local knowledge systems are ‘printed’ on the landscape through human-nature ‘relational ontologies’, and how such pictured living holds heritage in a continuum. Finally, the paper contends that a good knowledge of intergenerational ‘dwelling perspectives’ from different loci of enunciation would begin the decoloniality of heritage in Africa.

INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL ISSUE

This special issue aims to explore Canadian pedagogical and curricular practices in child and youth care and youth work preservice education with an emphasis on empirical and applied studies that centre students’ perspectives of learning. The issue includes a theoretical reflection and empirical studies with students, educators, and practitioners from a range of postsecondary programs in Quebec, Ontario, Alberta, and British Columbia. The empirical articles use various methodologies to explore pedagogical and curricular approaches, including Indigenous land- and water-based pedagogies, ethical settler frontline and teaching practices, the pedagogy of the lightning talk, novel-based pedagogy, situated learning, suicide prevention education, and simulation-based teaching. These advance our understanding of accountability and commitment to Indigenous, decolonial, critical, experiential, and participatory praxis in child and youth care postsecondary education. In expanding the state of knowledge about teaching and learning in child and youth care, we also aspire to validate interdisciplinary ways of learning and knowing, and to spark interest in future research that recognizes the need for education to be ethical, critically engaged, creatively experiential, and deeply culturally and environmentally relevant.

Re-defining Gendered Harm and Institutions under Colonialism: #MeToo in Australia

ABSTRACT Law's imaginary and logics are notoriously limited in their ways of thinking through and adjudicating sexual violence. The #MeToo movement is in large part a public, extra-legal response to the inadequacies of liberal law in responding to sexual violence. #MeToo has purportedly interrogated liberal institutions and the operation of gender within them. In particular, #MeToo has shown that gendered harm is a normalised part of the operation of liberal institutions. But more needs to be done within #MeToo to interrogate these concepts and to decolonise #MeToo. We need to decolonise and historicise the concepts of ‘gendered harm' and ‘institutions’ in order to understand how these have failed and, at times, even been weaponized against Indigenous women. This article provides a reading of Australian liberal institutions and recent historical processes with a view to showing how these institutions need to be interpreted in view of a decolonial praxis of #MeToo.

3New Materialisms

Abstract This review considers work in the field of new materialisms, bearing in mind the wide range of approaches that make up the broader ‘material turn’ in critical and cultural theory but focusing in particular on the feminist new materialist conversation that draws on the work of Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, Samantha Frost, Rosi Braidotti, and others. It notes the new materialisms’ continued heterogeneity and describes a turn to method in the field, one that enables a vibrant dialogue between applied and theoretical scholarship. The pieces reviewed share an engagement with that trend. They also illustrate two important problems that the field has engaged with in 2019. The first question concerns the new materialisms’ politics of citation, and the need for a decolonial practice that engages with indigenous and non-western thought. The second is the question of a new materialist ontology: how to reconcile the tension between ‘flat’ and differentiated, subject-oriented accounts of agency, significance, and value. The new materialists this review follows seek a middle ground, one that allows them to emphasize the political stakes of human and more-than-human relations. Following the introduction, sections are: 1. New Materialist Practice, Feminist Ends; 2. Indigeneity and the New Materialisms; 3. Sensation in a Material World; 4. A Cartography of the New Materialisms; 5. Reading's Situation; 6. Exclusion and Activist New Materialism; and 7. The Things We Imagine.

Rewriting Colonial Heritage in Bristol and Marseille: Contemporary Artworks as Decolonial Interventions

ABSTRACT In recent years, the issue of decolonizing heritage has emerged particularly strongly in cities that were historically at the heart of colonial entanglements. In Europe, sites associated with colonialism and slavery have become points of protest for a range of actors, including artists and the descendants of enslaved persons, and stemmed from British and French colonial histories. This article focuses on two cities, Bristol and Marseille, whose landscapes are imbued with residual traumatic memory, exploring how colonial/slave histories are rewritten in contemporary art practices as decolonial practices manifesting more inclusive commemorations of the past. The article analyzes how dynamic memorial activities in these cities entangle heritage and aesthetics with protest and draw attention to the capacity of artists to challenge existing civic narratives. It goes on to explore the methods used by artists – such as walking in the city, performance, and installation – to engage citizens located at the periphery in conversation and elicit their participation in the rewriting of civic histories.

Walking towards a camera obscura

The paper is located within the wider field of decolonial practice where those of us who were previously marginalized from ‘mainstream’ knowledge production by colonialism and its structures address the question of how we navigate ways of knowing from our own point of view. The paper places the concept of ‘walking about’ in relation to the Khelobedu saying ‘go sepela ke go bona’, both of which have parallels with the methodologies that Walter Benjamin espoused through the figure of the flâneur. The paper tracks my walkabouts as I follow the travels of several Balobedu from north-eastern South Africa to Berlin in 1897, by travelling to Berlin and other contemporary art centres myself. The practice of travelling offered opportunities in the form of dream as a khelobedu text, introduced me to installation art and led me to experiment with the idea and practice of the camera obscura, allowing me to confront some of the limits of photographic documentation. Overall, the paper argues that ‘walking about’ as a methodology resolves some of the difficulties with ideas of visuality associated with khelobedu and with mediating a text that demands a critical awareness of the relationship between the senses. The camera obscura, as a space that houses a body, becomes this medium and the text.

Urban re-generations: afterword to special issue on the politics of urban greening in Australian cities

ABSTRACT ‘Urban re-generations' is written as an afterword to the special issue of Australian Geographer on ‘The Politics of Urban Greening in Australian Cities'. The collection prompts a deep questioning of reparative and regenerative work associated with greening, green spaces and green infrastructures. The climate-driven 2019-2020 bushfire crisis and COVID-19 have amplified the visibility of the more-than-human connectivity of our cities and the deep underlying structures of social and environmental inequity underpinning a variety of urban green spaces and agendas. Inspired by the articles in this special issue, the afterword explores how we might call back the grammars and practices of regeneration from their service to the neo-liberal, settler-colonial city and instead nurture reparative de-colonial practices that aid in the collaborative work of re-composing, becoming into better relation with, and working in modes of situated historical and cultural difference, with green and just cities.

O game como meio de expressão: turnê Brasil

Em 2019, Isabelle Arvers embarca em uma turnê mundial de arte e jogos em países não ocidentais para promover a diversidade de gênero, sexualidade e origem geográfica e concentra-se em práticas queer, feministas e descoloniais. Vem trabalhando atualmente para a realização de uma exposição e conferência internacional sobre estudos de jogos pós-coloniais a serem realizadas na Sorbonne em 2020. Este texto tem por foco a turnê no Brasil.

Initiating decolonial praxis: childhood studies curricula in an English university

ABSTRACT English universities aim to attract students from various backgrounds. However, the needs of such cohorts require curricula to be relevant and accessible to an audience that does not necessarily identify as traditionally academic. At disciplinary level, there have also been calls for increasing the plurality of knowledge practices and perspectives. Here, we consider our efforts to reflect on and decolonise Childhood Studies curricula through three topics: global childhoods, disabled childhoods, and transgender/gender non-conforming childhoods. These case studies illustrate a decolonial turn in students engaging with differently constructed childhoods through content that challenges their thinking of childhood from a Western heteronormative, non-disabled perspective. We begin to decolonise our curricula through working with children’s voices and challenging practices that marginalise children and position their experiences as ‘other’.

Toward a Decolonial Praxis in Critical Peace Education: Postcolonial Insights and Pedagogic Possibilities

This paper argues for a decolonial praxis in critical peace education. Drawing on an integrative review method, the paper synthesises approaches, practices, and theories from peace and peace education literature with special attention paid to the concepts of critical peace education, cosmopolitanism, postcolonial thought, and decolonial action. The paper particularly explores the philosophical contributions of postcolonial and decolonial thought and how each could help toward decolonising approaches for critical peace education. The concept of ‘structural violence’ is critiqued as obfuscating individual responsibility. Insights are drawn here from the closely related field of global citizenship education that argues for a focus less on empathy and more on causal responsibility. Before concluding, the paper discusses a ‘pedagogy for the privileged’ and ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ that both might better support a decolonial praxis for critical peace education in theory and practice.

The Multiliteracies Learning Environment as Decolonial Nexus: Designing for Decolonial Teaching in a Literacies Course at a South African University

In higher education institutions in South Africa, educators working in the fields of language and academic literacy need to be sensitive and responsive to the linguistic and cultural diversity of the student body, and traditional pedagogical approaches are often inappropriate to meet the needs of students and of the wider call to decolonise higher education. As a group of lecturers working at the University of the Witwatersrand’s School of Education in Johannesburg, South Africa, we worked to respond to this context by designing a literacies course that was underpinned by a decolonial and social practices approach to literacy. Using critical reflection as a research method, this article traces our theoretical grounding in designing this course, including New Literacies Studies (NLS), community cultural wealth, and theories in indigenous studies, such as cultural interface theory. This article further demonstrates how we applied this theoretical framework through introducing practical activities that could be used to develop situated literacies and that tapped into the community cultural wealth that students bring to the classroom. We discuss four formative and summative assessment elements that were central to the course, namely online assessments, portfolio tasks, an argumentative essay, and what we termed the triad project, to illustrate how the decolonial approach informed our curriculum design and pedagogy. Our approach allowed us to explore new forms of assessment which opened space for students’ home languages, literacy practices, and identities to become valuable elements of teaching and learning.

Maya Textures: Conceptualizing Contemporary Indigenous Poetics, Patterns, and Performances

Maya Textures: Conceptualizing Contemporary Indigenous Poetics, Patterns, and Performances Sophie Esch Paul M. Worley, and Rita M. Palacios. Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge. Arizona UP, 2019. 232 pp. ISBN 978-0-8165-3427-2. Latin American literary studies have always been characterized by a certain unease when it comes to their main object of study: literature. From Ángel Rama’s La ciudad letrada to John Beverley’s Against Literature, Latin Americanists have been painfully aware that literature is a practice of power and close to power. Ever since writing in the Latin script was introduced and used by the European invaders to administrate, dominate, and represent the native population of the American continent, literature has been an instrument of power, a power generally held by white or mestizo elites. Recent decades, however, have led to an increased production by and visibility of non-white and non-mestizo voices. In this context appears Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge by Paul Worley and Rita Palacios. Their book continues the pattern of critical skepticism towards literature, but by centering indigenous intellectual production. In the introduction, the authors expressly state that this is not a book on literature, literary criticism, or literary theory (3). In this case, the distance to the literary has to do with a desire to move beyond narrow European Alphabet-centric conceptions of literature or writing in order to better conceptualize contemporary indigenous cultural forms of expression. In their attempt to unwrite the idea of Maya literature, they employ the Maya concept of Ts’íib, a term for cultural creation and recording that encompasses textual writing, performances, and pattern-making and which is inherently dynamic, social, and interconnected in nature. Understanding Ts’íib as “a multimodal site of cultural production (textile, textual, architectural, divinatory, or agricultural” (19), throughout the book’s seven chapters, Worley and Palacios discuss different dimensions and examples of ts’íib. The works analyzed include a wide range of examples of contemporary indigenous art and writing in Maya or Spanish from Mexico and Guatemala and include artists/pattern-creators belonging to different Maya groups such as K’iche, Kaqchikel, Tsotsil, Tseltal, Yucatec, Jakaltek, and Tz’utujil. Chapter 1 relates ts’íib to other Maya concepts such as cha’anil, k’anel, and cholel and discusses it in relation to the colonial legacy of European-style writing. Chapter [End Page 165] 2 focuses in particular on textiles as object-texts in practices of Maya weavers in Chiapas. Chapter 3, on the other hand, explores the intersection between writing and weaving in the poetry of Calixta Gabriel Chiquín and Ruperta Bautista. Chapter 4 focuses on the meaning of traditional Maya dress (traje), gender, and identity politics in the works of poets Humberto Ak’abal and Rosa Chávez in Guatemala. Chapter 5 analyzes contemporary decolonial practices in relation to the colonial-era books of Chilam Balam. Chapter 6 posits the bilingual poetry of Waldemar Noh Tzec as an act of rebellion aimed at creating a new plurilingual imagined community. Chapter 7 then pays attention to Maya visual art and the tensions that arise from Western conceptions of art and craft. The University of Arizona Press is a premier publishing venue for indigenous studies, and increasingly so the subfield contemporary indigenous literatures, a position it further strengthens with the publication of Unwriting Maya Literature. There is much to be commended about the book. For one there is the spectacular cover featuring art created by Taller Leñateros (and designed by Leigh McDonald), which captures the book’s argument beautifully. Taller Leñateros, founded in 1975 by the Mexican American poet Ámbar Past in San Crístobal de las Casas, is a largely female Maya Tsotsil cooperative focused on the preservation and dissemination of Maya culture that produces books, prints, and papers using traditional Maya techniques and natural materials. Secondly, there is the fact that the authors dared to co-author a book, making the book a rare gem within humanistic scholarship in the US still too focused on the single-authored monograph. But thirdly and most importantly it needs to be commended for its invaluable contribution to indigenous, Maya, and Latin American...

A Reflection on the ATHE 2019 Session: “Decolonizing Institutional Norms . . .”

A Reflection on the ATHE 2019 Session: “Decolonizing Institutional Norms . . .” Courtney Elkin Mohler (bio), Lisa Jackson-Schebetta (bio), Martine Kei Green-Rogers (bio), Bethany Hughes (bio), and Joy Brooke Fairfield (bio) Unmaking systemic expectations. . . . Dismantling established averages. . . . Remaking structural standards. . . . Against the usual. . . . Decolonizing institutional norms. Decolonizing is a word with a long history that contains an expansive and incisive critique.1 Previously used to define the shift to self-governance within formerly colonized nations, its rhetorical impact has grown with organizations as diverse as the United Nations and TeenVogue weighing in on its meaning.2 In naming our ATHE 2019 session, we chose to address what stands behind each word. Decolonizing. Institutional. Norms. In this reflection, we attend to the temporality, the complexity, the subversion, the challenges, and, above all, the materiality of decolonization as a process toward/for/of dismantling and remaking. As Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang have shown us, decolonization is not a metaphor for anything other than the return of land to Indigenous nations for the purpose of self-governance and Indigenous futurity. The question we reflect upon in this reflection is: How can a group of likeminded, dedicated individuals enact change in the spaces they inhabit and through the actions they take? To articulate the “in” and the “through” of this question, we describe how we understand ATHE as an institutional space and how we understand panel participation as an embodied, material act. We think together through our bodies, across the internet, over time, in multiple locations in order to understand our work to decolonize the (theatre) academy as ongoing. The work is unfinished. The Work Has Begun Conference culture reflects and precedes preoccupations of the academy. Consider the subgroups and critical foci one finds at a conference. Think about the plenaries and special workshops, down to the topics of individual panels or papers (the DNA of a given gathering). At any given moment, the specific attributes and programming choices that create a conference’s culture might be described cynically as trendy, reactionary, or exclusionary. But what if we eschewed such temptations to dismiss and categorize––activities that, let’s be honest, thrive in the academy? With a degree of organizational self-reflection, metacognitive evaluation, and sustained dialogue across conference subcultural groups, the culture of the conference has the opportunity to be transformative. Conferences serve as vital nodal points, sites wherein well-established networks are nourished and new connections can be formed. Conferences have their established ways of working and ways of knowing. We can adhere to them. We can deride them. Or we can utilize them to try out other ways of working, to honor and mobilize other ways of knowing. The Association for Theatre in Higher Education has been tending to such a transformation, which like any sea change, has been swelling for over ten years, building to a perceptively altered landscape. [End Page E-17] Various material conditions such as the rise of nationalism at home and abroad, the catastrophic impact of climate change, and increasingly polarized views of civil and human rights form the cultural milieu that theatre professionals and scholars must address in our work. This environment did not emerge suddenly; the vitality and diversity of the field of theatre has provided searing commentary on all of these existential concerns as they enter the mainstream––sometimes, perhaps even often, in advance of popular knowledge. ATHE’s inclusion of programming that contemplates or enacts decolonial practices and opportunities for scholarship on non-hegemonic theatre, performance, aesthetics, and craft has roots in the establishment of a variety of focus groups including, but not limited to, the Latinx, Indigenous, and the Americas Focus Group (LIA), and the Black Theatre Association (BTA). We have been especially interested in and heartened by the conversations and programming choices that ATHE has made over approximately the past five years, which include Indigenous peoples, histories, aesthetics, and ways of knowing. This momentum resulted in the Latina/o Focus Group (LFG) reflecting deeply on the scholarship and scholars it had regularly been supporting for years during the 2015 business meeting. In 2016, the members present at the LFG business meeting at the ATHE conference in Chicago discussed and...

Holding It Together: Indigeneity, (Settler-) Postcolonialism, and M. NourbeSe Philip

This article considers the conditions for relations between Indigenous and Black diasporic subjects, while also addressing Indigenous and South Asian relations. Concerned with the place of these subject relations within postcolonial and settler colonial paradigms and with their potential for decolonial practice, the article explores Jodi Byrd's and Marie Battiste's critiques of postcolonial and settler-colonial theories and M. NourbeSe Philip's verse-novella Looking for Mr. Livingstone. It also offers a personal anecdote about South Asian settler relations with caretakers of Stl'atl'imx land in British Columbia, Canada. It examines these texts and experiences through the concept of "the hold." "The hold," a spatial and epistemological condition for relations between Indigenous and diasporic subjects, allows one to imagine a sovereign Indigenous space as a practice of cross-racial kinship.