Decolonizing the westernized university: FEMDAC’s Black feminist interventions

• In Event: Feminist Decoloniality as Care joint panel of presentations and arts-based research by USA and South African academics

Proposal

This presentation provides a conceptual backdrop by describing Black decolonial feminisms that underly the work of Feminist Decoloniality as Care (FEMDAC) project researchers. In contemporary academic spaces, FEMDAC has adapted principles of decolonial theory to research, teaching and praxis conducted by colleagues in the social sciences transnationally. In the context of higher education, decoloniality recognizes that at is origin, the westernized university, regardless of location was created to support the interests of elites in our respective societies. Further “a decolonial critique… represents a critique of Eurocentricsm from subalternized and silenced knowledges” (2007: 211). The subaltern epistemic location of scholars and students both “socially located in the oppressed side of the colonial difference” and who hold epistemic perspectives of “knowledge coming from below … produces critical perspectives of hegemonic knowledge” (Grasfoguel 2007: 213). Thus, decolonial scholars and students seek to decenter western hegemonic knowledge.
FEMDAC notes that decoloniality as care requires constant self-reflection on the enemy within (Collins 1990). We have been taught in structures that have attempted to socialize us into the neoliberal logics of the westernized university. So, fighting against that socialization and those award structures within academia that rewards (and demands) competition, individualism, exclusionary practices, and exceptionalism, causes alienation. We must then build tools to exist in the liminal space of scholar activists and combatants in higher education.
Françoise Vergès, author of A Decolonial Feminism (2019; 2021) importantly decenters and criticizes ‘mainstream or white, bourgeois feminism’. She explains that decolonial feminism “is not a new wave of feminism, but the continuation of the struggles for the emancipation of women in the Global South.” (2021: 47-48). So decolonial feminism is not an outgrowth of bourgeois feminism that is seeking to correct itself by becoming more intersectional, it is instead born from movements for human dignity in the Global South. Further, it is does not emanate from an academic genealogy. “Decolonial feminisms draw on the theories and practices that women have forged over time in anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonial struggles, helping to expand theories of liberation and emancipation around the world.” (2021: 48).
In summary: adherents to Black transnational decolonial feminisms recognize: their affinity to a Black transatlantic imaginary; the primacy of joint struggles for human dignity, freedom, and justice; that neocolonial and neoliberal spaces and logics must be disrupted and replaced; that tools within our areas of expertise (as artists, academics, and in all other walks of life) and experience can be deployed to disrupt systems that dehumanize and oppress us; that individual access to scarce resources carries the grave responsibility to not only share those resources but to enhance routes of access to them for groups typically excluded from them; that we work in community in collaborative, restorative, reciprocal and redistributive ways; and we must connect with a community of practice of likeminded DF who will challenge us, grow with us, participate in the struggle with us and we must engage with this community to challenge our neocolonial and neoliberal socialization.

Author

• Assata Zerai, University of New Mexico