For Communities Imagined and Distant: Decolonization by Caribbean Womanism

• In Event: African Diasporic Theory and Practice for Educational Equity in the 21st Century

Abstract

Philosophical theorizing about postcolonial and decolonial theory eminently are concerned with human agency in political society and its institutions. Predominant nation states of global Africa exist in the postcoloniality relative to histories of occupation, commonwealth, and colonial domination. Tuck & Yang (2018) define decolonization studies as emphasizing “the way that colonization and decolonization are time-specific and land specific.” (p. xl). As such, as a moral point, it necessarily encompasses the “repatriation of indigenous lands and abolition of slavery in all forms (p. xii) in achieving social transformation. In addition, its logic pushes back “against assumptions about the linearity of history and the future and teleological narratives of human development, and argue for renderings of time and place that exceed coloniality and conquest” (p. xiii.)
These two demands place constraints on the relevance of the decolonial trope for countries in Caribbean, and Jamaica in particular, where no return of land or rights is possible. People of the Caribbean subscribe to a “imagined community” (Anderson, 1983) on which their national identity hangs. Yet the desire for social transformation that transcends the colonial gaze inhere in restrictive educational systems that are still beholden to regimes of empire. Education is one primary social vehicle to enhance or obstruct human freedom (Escayg & Clark, 2018). Pursuing postcolonialism through disrupting decolonized discourses in schools and education aligns with national projects of promoting national and cultural identity and pride.
Womanist ideas continue to show the promise for generating cultural forms in the wake of hegemonic and hierarchical social relationships of race and gender. Resulting art forms signal new indigeneities of liberation. Layli Maparyan published the Womanist Reader in 2006, an anthology of major scholarship of the emergent field and the Womanist Idea in 2012. Both texts located the roots of this worldview in three district strands of literature and scholarship. These precipitating origins were Alice Walker’s body of work and radical self-love and love of God, Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi’s, African womanism, (that is exclusive to African women) and Claire Hudson-Weems’ Africana womanism that draws on moral and spiritual resources for anti-racism. Jointly they constitute the womanist foundations as a “dynamic interpolation” (2012, p. 29)
This paper argues that the social transformation of Caribbean postcolonial states and education is conceivable through the interpolations of womanism in its tools of radical self-love, the spiritual movements that can engender social change and stalwart resistance to anti-blackness in order offer these new indigeneities as curricula and pedagogical resources.

Author

• Sheron A. Fraser-Burgess, Ball State University