No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred
... M. Jacqui Alexander (2006) echoes this idea of quiet strength in her conversation with Ekundayo, a priest and devotee to Oya, the Goddess of the wind and fire. In the chapter "Knowing Who Walks with You: The Making of Sacred Subjectivity," Alexander (2006) writes, "The challenge with which we are confronted here is how to move between death's clutches, and what Ekundayo suggests is that we do so by living in a particular way, by becoming still within Oya's multiple manifestations. ...
... M. Jacqui Alexander (2006) echoes this idea of quiet strength in her conversation with Ekundayo, a priest and devotee to Oya, the Goddess of the wind and fire. In the chapter "Knowing Who Walks with You: The Making of Sacred Subjectivity," Alexander (2006) writes, "The challenge with which we are confronted here is how to move between death's clutches, and what Ekundayo suggests is that we do so by living in a particular way, by becoming still within Oya's multiple manifestations. It is no simple task" (p. ...
This article considers how institutions of higher education participated in the national “racial reckoning” that followed the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. Using the work of Pan-Africanist jurist Motsoko Pheko, memoirist Sisonke Msimang, poet Audre Lorde, and Black queer feminist critics Tiffany Willoughby-Herard and M. Jacqui Alexander, the authors reflect on the principled research practices and ethos that catalyze sustainable repair. Durable forms of repair include reconnecting the feeling body with the knowing self, stillness, and tarrying. The authors (two doctoral students and a professor colleague) also consider repair through attention to the material conditions of knowledge production (collaborative writing, reclaiming the sacred, and questioning what it means to make something whole without reproducing a singular dominating episteme) to disrupt academic hierarchies. Arguing that repairing society, the planet, or the ways that questions are asked and answered requires ongoing wrestling with our current climate of racial terror in higher education, this article embodies the authors’ reparative principles and envisions paths towards educational justice.
... Higher education and educational research in particular are in dire need of this expanded understanding. Operating with certainty that Black life and Black method-making act together as critical sites of study and knowledge production (Alexander, 2005), I posit that research in and across higher education can benefit methodologically and theoretically from Black ways of being. The potentiality of such benefits is predicated on the strength and attributes of Black methods. ...
... Academia did not take from me, despite navigating it in the shadows of a global pandemic, unrest over police brutality, and the loss of George Floyd. Justice, according to Alexander (2005) was something to be sought after in the teaching taking place in academia. Yet the realization, "teaching for justice is at odds with a hegemonic narrative that would foreground in a one-sided manner an ascendent corporate class as the sole agents of history" (p. ...
This paper builds on decolonizing educational research discourse. Rich, generative, and diverse forms of knowledge production, includes that of the Caribbean. Specifically, the paper uses the Black Caribbean method of Liming, which is an indigenous methodology. The paper illustrates how educational research practices can be enriched by Black and Caribbean ways of thinking, being and knowing. This diversity would support a pivot from Western methods. The author employs reflections from her dissertation writing and research experience, while highlighting the dire need to incorporate and institutionalize methods from Black scholars, Black communities, and the Global South. Via this paper, I illustrate how Liming has allowed for greater discourse, and learning with the diverse communities served. Liming’s contributions are beneficial in educational research as well its utility for other areas of research. Lastly, this paper processes the idea that Caribbean, African-centric, and Black, knowledge- making such as Liming are liberatory.
... To think about Borikén and Jamaica as singular islands diminishes existing archipelagic connections (Martínez-San Miguel & Stephens, 2020), the entanglements of colonization, enslavement, and racial capitalism (Gilmore, 2023;Olusoga, 2018), and, importantly, resistance and resurgence that extends across this archipelago and beyond (Alexander, 2005;Lowe, 2015). ...
In this photo essay, we take readers through ecologies of de/colonization that we engage with in our creative methodology of walking and talking. As academics called upon to do equity, diversity and decolonization work in colonial institutions, we reflect on our location in lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ lands (“Victoria, BC, Canada”) and the circuits that extend to the Caribbean archipelago of our origins and families (Borikén/Puerto Rico and Jamaica). We take up the tasks of collectively reflecting on how to care for our communities and for each other in an interconnected world amidst socio-ecological crisis. Our method that emerged during the pandemic is specific to our embodiments “here” as settlers of Caribbean roots whose family histories “there” include both complicity with and domination by colonization, trans-Atlantic enslavement, and forced migration. We are attempting to learn, as we hold the messiness of institutions who want straightforward paths to remediate racism, colonization, and the like. Our walking and talking follow a meandering and re-visiting process prompted by our institutional contexts and circumstances, and also by serendipity, surprise and beauty offered through non-human elements on our walks. The photos evidence these moments and the connections to “here-there” in ecologies of de/colonization. We invite readers on our circuitous paths that involve deconstructing, and building or affirming, noticing, following literal paths and those in scholarly-activist circles. In the creative process of drawing relations of the here-there, and attending to serendipity, ancestral spirit, and more-than-human agency, we witness and imagine worlds otherwise (King et al., 2020). These circuitous roots and routes offer possibilities of reckoning, repairing and re-worlding.
... Assim como no "tempo palimpsesto" evocado por Jacqui Alexander (2005), em que o tempo é revelado por meio da repetição, como um pergaminho manuscrito cuja primeira escrita foi imperfeitamente apagada para que um novo texto pudesse ser escrito, a "meta-tradição iorubá" -formada por essas conversas entre diferentes versões da cultura e da religião iorubá -funciona como um palimpsesto, ao mesmo tempo esquecendo e lembrando, marca de um desaparecimento e portador de uma nova criação que hoje torna possível a presença de corpos brancos em uma religião negra. Um conceito de tempo como palimpsesto sugere que o passado é visível e tem um efeito sobre o presente, mas aqui a memória da escravidão é "imperfeitamente apagada" para ressuscitar os vínculos com um passado pré-colonial -a teia de Sàngó/Xangô que atravessa o Atlântico Negro -de uma diáspora religiosa que há muito tempo não se limita apenas aos afrodescendentes. ...
Este artigo visa a analisar a construção de patrimônios afro-diaspóricos entre a Nigéria e o Brasil, mostrando como a história iorubá se faz presente nas trocas culturais entre os dois lados do oceano Atlântico. Veremos que, hoje em dia, na Nigéria, a patrimonialização de monumentos, práticas culturais ou sítios naturais tem se tornado uma nova arma para reafirmar a supremacia das principais autoridades tradicionais iorubás. Nesses processos, a “religião” ocupa uma posição central na salvaguarda das tradições culturais iorubás. Mas, para que a religião iorubá se torne “patrimônio”, ela deve ser pensada, antes de tudo, como “cultura”. Os processos de seleção das representações do patrimônio cultural iorubá são assim acionados nas fronteiras movediças que separam religião e cultura. O papel da “diáspora” tornou-se crucial no reconhecimento do valor patrimonial de práticas e monumentos religiosos no território iorubá, construíndo um espaço afro-religioso transnacional.
... When racial incidents and protests about campus climate arise, administrators rely on diversity statements to respond and direct students to diversity policies and programs (Berrey, 2011(Berrey, , 2015byrd, 2022;Cole & Harper, 2017;Hoffman & Mitchell, 2016). These diversity policies often center whiteness and eurocentric epistemologies while subordinating alternative ways of knowing and anyone who is not white (Alexander, 2005). Neutrality in university statements about equity distances the institution from its racist history and present racist realities. ...
Designing racial diversity and equity initiatives is increasingly prevalent in higher education organizations, often in response to social demands for racial justice, yet many leaders are often underprepared to lead their program or school toward change that centers racial justice in policy, practices, and culture. Moreover, the prevalence of whiteness and racialized emotions challenge leaders as they attempt to carry out change. In this critical comparative case study of one graduate school and six graduate programs across three historically white-serving public institutions, I examine how whiteness via racialized emotions emerged in leaders’ diversity and equity planning and implementation. I consider ramifications for racially just organizational transformation in higher education and suggest leaders decenter white-racialized emotions prevalent throughout the equity planning and implementation process.
This article is an autoethnographic exploration of life in the former steel mill region of Southeast Chicago in the ‘Rust Belt’ of the Midwestern United States. It challenges assumptions about deindustrialization that depict one discrete historical stage following another (i.e., the postindustrial following the industrial) in favor of what is here defined as the ‘paraindustrial’ (or a setting in which active industry with minimal numbers of workers exists alongside defunct industry and toxic brownfields). This account centers upon the experiences of women who have too often been neglected in research on deindustrialized regions. In particular, it focuses on the author's elderly mother Arlene who has spent her entire life in Southeast Chicago. From her wheelchair on a backyard porch, Arlene observes this damaged landscape built out of the former Calumet wetlands. The article considers the relationships of care, centered around women, that continue to bind together and support the living despite decades of economic and environmental rupture and degradation. Utilizing the concept of a ‘palimpsest,’ the piece considers how different historical, ecological, and social realities and temporalities are both layered on top of each other and intermingle to create the complex landscape found in this former wetland region.
Resumo Compartilho com você, leitor, uma pesquisa-ação sobre um projeto de aprendizagem-ação construído em uma organização governamental sediada no Brasil, em cooperação com uma escola de administração, na qual tentamos desfazer dinâmicas da gerencialização recolonizante do campo da administração de desenvolvimento (AD) pelo campo da gestão governado pelo projeto de neoliberalismo como a única opção de desenvolvimento global. A gerencialização de desenvolvimentos sulistas escuros administrados que ressurgem nos anos 2000 com mais importância do que nas décadas 1950-1960 de descolonizações no Sul e no Norte reafirma binarismos civilizacionais da matriz colonial/racial do poder que diferenciam humanos e sub-humanos para combater a patologia do desenvolvimento reverso supostamente internalizada por corpos escuros sulistas como o meu. Por meio de um diálogo entre epistemes sulistas submersas que desafiam binarismos desumanizantes com epistemologias-ação nortistas, abraço a pespectiva de crescente população de condenados da terra e mulheres de cor para reaprendemos AD e epistemologias-ação como corpos escuros parcialmente controlados pela universidade neoliberal creolizante. Com a práxis de decolonizar mais e recolonizar menos, reaprendemos e compartilhamos o agir-refletir-agir do desfazimento da expansão gerencialista do capital colonial/racial e de cumplicidades correspondentes dentro e em torno de nossos corpos sulistas.
This article presents action research about an action learning project developed in a government organization based in Brazil in cooperation with a business school. The project sought to undo the dynamics of the recolonizing managerialization of the field of development administration (DA) by the field of management ruled by the US-led project of neoliberalism as the only option for global development. The managerialization of southern dark administered developments that resurfaced in the 2000s with more importance than in the decolonizing and liberating 1950s-1960s reaffirms civilizational binarisms of racial/colonial capital, which differentiate humans and subhumans to combat the pathology of reverse development supposedly internalized by dark southern bodies. Through a dialogue between submerged Southern epistemes that challenge dehumanizing binaries with Northern action-epistemologies, this study embraces the perspective of a growing population of the wretched of the earth and women of color so that we relearn AD and action-epistemologies as dark bodies partially controlled by the neoliberal creolizing university. With the praxis of decolonizing more and recolonizing less, we learn and share the acting-reflecting-acting of undoing the managerialist expansion of colonial/racial capital and corresponding complicities within and around our dark/light bodies.
Trauma and Spirituality in Ethnic American Women's Novels—Connected by Invisible Fibers establishes the relevance of what is here referred to as spiritual trauma narratives as a site of knowledge production and resistance that re-examines trauma in a spiritual context of interconnection.
This chapter illuminates how Toni Morrison’s Africana spiritual trauma narrative Love (2003) draws on West African or Pan-African cosmologies and deploys spiritual modes and symbols as literary expressions of traumatic experience and resistance as a means to link characters to trauma via ancestral knowledge traditions, thus engaging readers by highlighting alternative ways of knowing to the Western perspective. More specifically, the chapter examines the ways in which Love is informed by aspects of a West African worldview to explore the impact of racial division and racism and the costs of the Civil Rights Movement and shows that the novel performs spiritual work as it enacts for readers a spiritual consciousness of interconnectedness that counters the binary logic on which traumatizing forces depend and that denies African American and Diasporic spiritual epistemologies. As part of her undertaking of reclaiming ancestral knowledge, Morrison employs the water deity Yemoja to connect characters with readers modeling a shift in awareness acted out by the two main characters as they reconcile after decades of misunderstanding. Ultimately, Yemoja represents love in the novel, in her concern for and protection of the protagonists in an African American context of segregation and post-civil rights.
This chapter demonstrates the urgency of examining trauma and spirituality as depicted in the works of ethnic women writers in America. It defines spirituality as it is used in the book as an awareness that recognizes the interconnectedness of all beings and elements of existence and trauma as a rupture in this spiritual connection, often the result of colonialism, racism, and marginalization. The chapter takes a revisionary look at Cathy Caruth’s work from a woman of color feminist perspective and underscores the necessity of integrating non-Western spiritual beliefs and practices to expand the Eurocentric focus of trauma studies, demonstrating that that the two fields would benefit from a dialogue and that trauma theory is partly already in line with women of color feminism. The revisionary look also reveals a connection between trauma, spirituality, and environment as women of color feminism often connect ecological concerns with spiritual issues, both of which have received only scant attention in trauma studies. Ultimately, the chapter presents a reassessment of trauma as a collective experience that promotes what Gloria Anzaldúa refers to as spiritual activism, spirituality for social change through a consciousness of interconnectedness, emphasizing literature’s transformative potential as a site of spiritual knowledge production and opposition.
This article critically examines the complexities of internationalism within German radical Left movements, especially in the face of war, humanitarian crises, and the global reach of late-stage capitalism. Germany's failed response to the Genocide in Gaza and its carceral turn is shaped by the State's approach to national memory, which is deeply rooted in its ideas of liberalism in approximation with Zionism. This narrows the radical Left's engagement with global violence and divides movements into fractions. To address this issue, the article turns to internationalist feminist movements that actively challenge this culture of guilt and complicity. It explores how these collectives seek to forge broader alliances and initiate decolonial connections through solidarity with one another. By drawing on decolonial feminist practices from Palestine, these movements illustrate the potential for new feminist kinships and anticolonial solidarities. This urges us to redefine what we really mean by internationalism.
This paper maps key factors that activate adult stakeholders in Ontario to support curriculum pertaining to consent and non-violence in K-12 education. The paper draws from a study that used three qualitative approaches: (1) the design of an original media literacy curriculum module for Ontario youth ages 13-15; (2) curriculum assessment of the module by diverse stakeholders in Ontario K-12 education (n=20); and (3) analysis of archival documents pertaining to consent education and media literacy in Ontario, including official curriculum and media reports. Four key factors united stakeholders in supporting K-12 curriculum pertaining to consent and non-violence in Ontario. Firstly, stakeholders are intrigued by media-based pedagogies that can facilitate consent education that is “culturally relevant” (Ladson-Billings 1994; 1995) for diverse learners in Ontario. Stakeholders are also more likely to support consent and violence prevention initiatives if accompanied by professional development and teaching tools. Educator collectives and political organizing also allow for more feminist and social-justice pedagogies in the classroom, including consent education. Finally, parent councils and community groups are essential places for activism and knowledge sharing that can meet the needs of community members, while addressing stakeholders’ attitudes and behaviours that gatekeep violence prevention initiatives in education.
From nineteenth-century antislavery pamphleteering to accounts of ecological catastrophe in twenty-first-century fiction, Haitian literature has resounded across the globe since the nation's revolutionaries declared independence in 1804. Starting with pre-revolutionary writing, including the emergence of Haitian Creole letters, extending to the long, largely francophone nineteenth century, and concluding with present-day Haitian writing in the English language, A History of Haitian Literature presents the political, cultural, and historical frameworks necessary to comprehend Haiti's vast literary output. Whether writing in Haiti or its wide-ranging diasporas, Haitian authors have boldly contributed to pressing conversations in global letters while reflecting Haiti's unique cultural and historical experiences. Considering an expansive array of poets, playwrights, and novelists – such as Baron de Vastey, Juste Chanlatte, Demesvar Delorme, Edwidge Danticat, René Depestre, Kettly Mars, Dany Laferrière, and Évelyne Trouillot – the contributors to this volume offer a fresh examination of a richly polyglot, transnational literary tradition that spans more than two centuries.
O artigo tem como objetivo apresentar e analisar duas experiências de sala de aula dos cursos de antropologia e arqueologia da Universidade Federal do Oeste do Pará. O contexto em que essas experiências se desenrolam é marcado pela sobreposição de uma política de governo baseada na explicitação brutal do racismo contra a população negra e indígena, que resultou numa gestão trágica da Pandemia da Covid-19 causando a morte de 600 mil pessoas, e de ataques diretos às universidades públicas. Ainda assim, não interrompemos o nosso “trabalho” cotidiano de entrar em nossas salas de aula, mesmo as virtuais, com a disposição para criar comunidades e montar estratégias para desafiar a ordem anti-negra e racista vigente. O artigo é uma composição da escrita sensível de duas amigas educadoras que se conheceram no front dentro da Universidade. Os relatos que seguem foram elaborados à luz da tese de Conceição Evaristo sobre a “escrevivência”. Por isso, a centralidade do relato livre, que teoriza e dialoga com um acervo de ideias e referenciais epistemológicos próprios de um pensamento negro transatlântico, com essa base de reflexão utilizamos a categoria “feitiço” e a ideia de “epistemologias do transe”.
As a collective of inter-cultural women moving in but not of, and against and beyond the modern/colonial (neoliberalised) university we (t)race generative pedagogical experiences of worldmaking cosmopolitics and their (im)possibilities within the University and Politics Disciplinarity. We do this not to redeem or reimagine but to contribute to an enfleshed feminised and racialised undercommons for whom indigenist-decolonial feminist pedagogical-political praxis can never be nor desire to be obedient to the constraints, containments and violences of the settler colonial and its epistemological- pedagogical genocidal project of the Lettered City of anti-Blackness and Indigenous disavowal. We refuse inclusion within, representation as legibility, and the making of community of and as the University. We instead foreground abolitionist categories such as enfleshment, dignity, mutual recognition as exteriority, differential responsible relationship-making, multiple temporalities and the epistemological as ontological, and we centre the knowledges of Indigenist feminised subjects from the exteriority of modernity-coloniality. We are thus selective and explicit about who we choose to walk with, who we make relationship with, and to whom we are responsible and honour. We both guard our right to opacity as well as leave threads of pedagogical meaning- making as invitation to unlearning and relearning new-ancient onto-epistemologies and cosmovisions that move us towards plural pedagogical worlds beyond heteropatriarchal capitalist-coloniality.
This article expands the notion of queer domesticity from the vantage point of the global South. Drawing on autoethnography, ephemeral archives, and secondary sources, the authors examine Nanur Basha, the residence of a Bangladeshi queer activist and community mentor, which in 2016 was the site of two murders committed by a local chapter of Al-Qaeda. By empirically interrogating the events leading up to the unmaking of Nanur Basha, the authors argue that global South queer domesticities — constituted by quotidian practices of queer worlding and expanding from apartments to rooftops to streets to political discourses — aspire to greater political freedom by deploying imaginative and counterhegemonic practices. As queer domesticities open up interstitial sanctuaries in nationalist discourses and within the urban fabric, they are also unmade by competing postcolonial nationalisms. Contesting Nanur Basha's reduction to a site of victimhood under Islamic terrorism and homophobia, this article illustrates how Nanur Basha indexes a subterranean modality of southern queer domesticity that negotiates secrecy, safety, celebration, and survival under heterosexist nationalist surveillance and violence. Such queer domesticities underpin an affective sanctuary at the borderlands between queer joy and injury. The article contributes to emerging conversations in transnational queer studies by situating queer worldmaking practices within landscapes of authoritarianism and queerphobia.
This article contributes to global sociology through the construction of African sociological vocabularies from Nguni vernacular terms in Southern Africa. We employ Toyin Falola’s concept of “ritual archives” to argue that the social practices of senior African women teach and promote the sociological imagination for a global sociology that moves beyond the confines set by the “founding fathers” of the discipline. We combine the women’s status in the African household with the general understanding of being umntu (person), uluntu (society), and ubuntu (humanity) to argue for a locally informed linguistic terms and vocabularies that could promote inclusive global sociology.
The future of teaching will increasingly rely on overseas-trained teachers (OTTs) to address teacher shortages. While research on OTTs in the United States is expanding, studies focusing on Afro-Caribbean teachers are emerging. Despite the growing call for more teachers of color, Afro-Caribbean OTTs’ contributions are often overlooked due to their immigrant status. We propose the concepts of “radical transparency” and “fugitive care” to articulate how these teachers’ classroom practices offer alternative possibilities for schooling, making the learning process both explicit and equitable for all students. Drawing on a Transnational Black Feminist Framework (TBF), we highlight the unique politics of care practiced by these teachers, revealing gaps in our cultural understanding and underscoring their vital, yet understudied, contributions to education.
This article argues that some forms of affective metacognition as described in philosophy and pedagogy can be conceived as non-conceptual, embodied and decolonial. We start from the notion of metacognitive feelings experienced by embodied and situated agents, to propose the concept of metacognitive sentiments. We argue that the knowledge of the body from decolonial epistemologies allows us to base a pedagogy of feeling based on affective learning processes, capable of generating or re-learning habits with a transformative potential. We emphasize the need to cultivate strategies of embodied agency as part of educational methodologies that influence patterns of bodily awareness, capacities for (self-)reflection on our being-in-the-world, and the development of inter-affectivity. We insist that feeling-thinking is useful for solving the situated problems we face in Latin America. Finally, we propose a methodology that fosters its cultivation.
This article argues that some forms of affective metacognition as described in philosophy and pedagogy can be conceived as non-conceptual, embodied and decolonial. We start from the notion of metacognitive feelings experienced by embodied and situated agents, to propose the concept of metacognitive sentiments. We argue that the knowledge of the body from decolonial epistemologies allows us to base a pedagogy of feeling based on affective learning processes, capable of generating or re-learning habits with a transformative potential. We emphasize the need to cultivate strategies of embodied agency as part of educational methodologies that influence patterns of bodily awareness, capacities for (self-)reflection on our being-in-the-world, and the development of inter-affectivity. We insist that feeling-thinking is useful for solving the situated problems we face in Latin America. Finally, we propose a methodology that fosters its cultivation.
The centrality of the self (including in published life narratives, social media confessionals, social movements and even our own classroom rituals), and the attendant conflation of experience, analysis, and truth, revive longstanding questions about our investment in the individual. The self and its narration continue to be messy and evolve in tandem with intense societal, technological, and economic shifts. This article grows from an interest in the tension between affirming the diverse set of experiences that gather in our classrooms, and challenging students to think systemically about the social world and our place in it. Published life-narratives—here I discuss the work of Virginia Grise and Valeria Luiselli—provide pedagogical opportunities to fortify agentic knowers by cultivating a practice of critical recognition. A practice of critical recognition in the classroom and beyond may help us all better face both what we know and what we don’t know, together.
The Moroccan and Spanish governments pursue the visibility of people and things. They observe and survey in order to codify, catalogue, classify, and calculate. Rather than trace the contours of such projects, this paper seeks to provoke a more sustained engagement with modes of errantry that confound their logics of command and control. Building on more than 18 months of multi‐sited ethnography, it explores how marginalised communities navigate unequal geographies of visibility. To do so, I revisit the work of Édouard Glissant and some of his interlocutors to contemplate fluctuating vectors of opacity amongst communities living in hashish trafficking hubs. Frequently stigmatised as violent criminals and indolent freeloaders—their itineraries effaced—inhabitants of La Atunara (Spain) and the central Rif (Morocco) grapple with detection and wrestle with capture. This paper explores these positionings without reading them as disarray or disorder but as purposeful refusals worthy of political reflection.
Calls to decolonize education systems cannot be removed from broader social struggles. Scholars have engaged in theoretical discussions on what decolonization entails, emphasizing the need for transforming thoughts, beliefs, and practices. However, the lack of sustained engagement and widespread resistance to decolonizing the curriculum remain evident, underscoring the urgency to envision new futures and explore relationalities between educators and students.
In this article, we delve into the evolving terminologies surrounding decolonization, anticolonization, and Indigenization, emphasizing their pivotal roles in the broader project of educational decolonization. We argue that a reassertion of Indigenous resistance and futurity in higher education forms the cornerstone of this transformative process. Through an examination and understanding of these terminologies, we aim to contribute to the ongoing dialogue surrounding educational decolonization and envision inclusive, equitable, and anticolonial learning environments that centre on Indigenous knowledge and perspectives.
Analysis of qualitative data is generally approached as a positive affair in the sense that researchers look for the presence of interesting patterns or themes. Yet, situations can arise in which a notable finding in the data is the absence of something that might be expected. The situation can be likened to the story of Sherlock Holmes and the dog that didn’t bark, in which meaning can be drawn not from presence of something but from its lack. In this presentation, I explore the methodological implications of conspicuous absences as findings in qualitative analysis. This includes consideration of a priori theory, researcher positionality and researcher as research apparatus, erasure and palimpsest, and epistemology of absence-based inference. The presentation concludes with consideration of quality in absences as findings in qualitative research.
This article historicizes the religious fervor of the 1969 Stonewall riots—multiple direct actions against the anti-Black and homo- and transphobic NYPD and white-owned bars in Greenwich Village—by examining the political organizing of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, cofounders of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. This article queries and queers the field’s preoccupation with the cisgender and heterosexual regarding religious affiliation and the formation of liberation theologies, and probes at the heart of Johnson’s and Rivera’s critical absences in religious studies on the one hand, and the critical absence of their religious sensibilities in narrations of queer and trans politics on the other.
In this chapter an examination of how universities, particularly the University of South Africa, adapt to remain relevant and inclusive, with a focus on postgraduate students in Africa. Unisa, with a 150-year history and a reputation for conferring the most degrees in South Africa, utilizes an open distance e-learning (ODeL) model serving nearly 400 000 students annually including 40 097 postgraduates in 2023. This investigation employs exploratory qualitative research utilizing thematic analysis of primary and secondary literature sources to assess the contextual adaptations implemented by Unisa. The study reveals that context-driven adaptations, such as Africanization and the integration of emerging technologies, have positively contributed to the university's efforts in shaping promising futures for its students. Consequently, recommendations based on these findings for future adaptations are proposed aiming to align tertiary education with the needs of postgraduate students particularly in Africa.
In her biomythographical work Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Audre Lorde’s lover Afrekete appears as a Black queer femme who alters her sense of self and her being through religio-erotic experience. After tracing the spirit who inspired Lorde’s Afrekete throughout the Americas, I propose a theory of the shoreline as a site of transoceanic becoming, or the experience of self-identification required to navigate the Western world as an African diaspora being. I focus primarily on the ontologies of Black trans and queer femmes and the unconscious yet necessary process of becoming at the intersections of existence.
This field-defining volume of queer anthropology foregrounds both the brilliance of anthropological approaches to queer and trans life and the ways queer critique can reorient and transform anthropology. Consisting of fourteen original essays by both distinguished and new voices, Unsettling Queer Anthropology advances a vision of queer anthropology grounded in decolonial, abolitionist, Black feminist, transnational, postcolonial, Indigenous, and queer of color approaches. Critically assessing both anthropology’s queer innovations and its colonialist legacies, contributors highlight decades of work in queer anthropology; challenge the boundaries of anthropology’s traditional methodologies, forms, and objects of study; and forge a critical, queer of color, decolonizing queer anthropology that unsettles anthropology’s normative epistemologies. At a moment of revitalized calls to reckon with the white supremacist and settler colonial logics that continue to shape anthropology, this volume advances an anthropology accountable to the vitality of queer and trans life.
Contemporary feminist scholars problematize the difficulties of creating meaningful political alliances between Indigenous and diasporic communities in settler states such as Canada and the United States. This essay uses a relational framework to trace how two feminist artists, one Indigenous and one diasporic, creatively resist the ongoing and uneven conditions of settler colonial capitalism. The essay examines artwork by Tannis Nielsen, a midcareer Indigenous artist with Métis, Anishnawbe, and Danish ancestry, and Rosa Sungjoo Park, an emerging diasporic Korean artist with landed status in Canada. Taken together, the artists’ works offer fruitful opportunities to think through difficult questions about power, history, and representation on Turtle Island. Both Nielsen and Park engage “pedagogies of the Sacred” to honor ancestral traditions and spiritual practices while disrupting binary narratives of tradition vs. modernity. I contend that their creative use of digital media draws on lived experience, embodied knowledge, and spirituality to refuse colonialism’s hyper-individualism and imagine alternative worlds.
The Commonwealth of Dominica pledged to become the world’s first climate-resilient country after the devastation of Hurricane Maria, with ecotourism being part of that sustainable development strategy. Ecotourism growth on the lush eastern Caribbean island has since surpassed pre-storm levels, even during the COVID-19 pandemic. Crucial to the government’s sustainable resilience strategy has been ethno-cultural tourism of the island’s Kalinago (Indigenous peoples of the Lesser Antilles) community such as handicraft instruction, food preparation, canoe building, Indigenous-led tours, and cultural entertainment centers. This article explores development of a comprehensive ecotourism industry in the Indigenous district of Kalinago Territory as a means toward economic sustainability in the Nature Isle with focus on Kalinago cultural producers and their ongoing contestations of Indigenous absence in the Caribbean through a framework of Indigenous Caribbean revival.
In this article, I analyze the under-citation of Black and/or Latine scholars—especially those located disciplinarily within religious studies—in the anthropology of religion. I draw from my own experience as an editorial assistant at History of Religions, manuscript reviewer, and Latine ethnographer of religion to speculate on the reasons why researchers might refuse to cite them, preferring either to neglect their contributions or to “plagnore” them, to borrow a term coined by legal scholar, law professor, and activist Lolita Buckner Inniss. I then expand on Chicana and Boricua feminist and race scholar Nichole Margarita Garcia’s theorization of under-citation as “spirit-murdering.” I invoke philosopher and political scientist Achille Mbembe’s formulation of necropolitics to make the case that citation is a matter of life and death for Black and Latine women scholars in particular. In the absence of institutional accountability for editors and authors, I conclude with recommendations for the diversification of our scholarship and syllabi.
This paper explores how Brazilian Black queer women's sensorial knowing expresses the ways that anti‐Blackness and anti‐queerness are experienced within Brazilian gynecological spaces. I show how Black queer forms of sensory representations signal the intimacy of occupying place and time in power relations. What does it mean to feel, touch, and see the mechanisms of prejudice and institutional power? What are the sounds and vibrations of racism and heteronormativity in medicine? What do the senses tell us about Black queer bodies’ orientations and adverse reactions within those spaces? I engage the senses to understand how sensorial knowledge is keenly embedded in the evidence and informs how Black queer life is shaped within the quotidian. I discuss how sensorial experiences for the critical possibilities of conceptualizing sensoriality and social meanings of medical space and place and in relation to the material world of gynecology and its technologies.
In their report of the violences committed during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), the Commission for Historical Clarification stated that “historical memory, both individual and collective,” is important for creating just conditions and providing reparations to the victims of violence perpetrated during this armed conflict (1998, 48). As a result, remembrance projects began to create a memoria histórica that historicizes the violences committed by the Guatemalan government. These remembrance projects and memories often imagine a heteronormative Guatemalan populace and, in turn, erase the existence of queer and trans Maya people also affected by violence and ongoing genocide.
In this article I argue that the practice of Maya backstrap weaving is a rhetorical mechanism for remembrance and maintenance of traditional practices. Using a Two Spirit critique, I articulate a Maya-centered queer/trans rhetorical methodology that points to how Western historiographic methodologies continue to be the norm in Guatemalan historicizing practices, but also within WGSS, queer and trans studies, and rhetoric and writing studies. My use of backstrap weaving is a type of storytelling and remembrance practice that centers cultural rhetorics, Indigenous sovereignty, and locally specific Indigenous paradigms and frameworks to stop the erasure of Indigenous peoples from collective consciousness and canons.
displaced Maya communities. To pursue knowledge about the communities’ visions for thriving in the United States, I worked with Maya leaders in Ohio to coordinate a series of dialogues utilizing a Participatory Action Research paradigm. Participants exposed ways in which Western institutions (including hospitals, mental health providers, and schools) reenact elements of colonialism and fail to offer culturally sensitive care. The participants emphasized a key missing element in their well-being: renewing the relationship with the Earth that they lost through colonization and forced migration. To separate physical/mental health from these elements would deny the current ecological realities at the heart of the migrants’ existence. It would also recreate Eurocentric false division among mind, body, soul, and spirit. Maya focus group participants claimed that a decolonial approach to healing could be initiated by returning land to the communities, which they could use for cultivation, community gathering, food sovereignty, and sacred practices. Praxis participants offered critical guidance in re-imagining health and healing in community with each other and with the Earth, which they identified as the sources of flourishing, identity, cultural history, belonging, and spiritual connection.
Using our work together on an upper-level undergraduate English course as an example, we illustrate that a just combination of librarian and faculty skills and labor, made visible to each other and to students, creates the conditions to enact a transformative student-centered pedagogical approach with special collections as a site of learning and activism. However, we first had to recognize, reflect on, and reject the power dynamics that pervade librarian-faculty collaboration. We will expound on our shared critique of power within the neoliberal corporatized academy that helped us get beyond the conventional librarian-faculty teaching partnership to experiment with critical pedagogies of possibility and enact a feminist praxis; modeling and cultivating interdependent confidence and vulnerability to empower students to be free and creative thinkers.
This paper begins with an overview of the theorization of diasporic media by various scholars from Canada and the UK, and gestures to how the typology of diasporic media charted by Eugenia Siapera in her chapter ‘Minority and Diasporic Media’ elides an account of alternative diasporic media arts (independent film and video) produced by intersectional plural identities diasporic subjects/artists whose work unsettle relations to the heteronormative, raced and gendered constructions of the nation, nationality, migration. The second part of the article is written from Michelle’s perspective as a queer racialized Caribbean-Canadian diasporic artist, engages in a self-reflexive analysis of the fractured Indo-Caribbean diasporic identity and aesthetics represented in Coconut/Cane & Cutlass (Canada/Guyana, 1994) and Black female and queer subjectivities represented in Blu in You (Canada/Tobago, 2008).
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7.4 (2001) 663-679
In modernity, identities inevitably become global. Indeed, few things remain local in the aftermath of the rise of capitalism. Just as goods and people come to circulate in new ways, so too identities emerge and come into specific relations of circulation and expansion. In this globalized framework of encounter and exchange, sexual identities are similar to other kinds of identities in that they are imbued with power relations. These power relations are connected to inequalities that result from earlier forms of globalization, but they have also generated new asymmetries. Our task is to examine both the specificities and the continuities within the globalization of sexual identities at the present juncture.
For the most part, throughout the twentieth century, what we might call politically "progressive" studies of sexuality emerged as a result of identity politics and social movements. Increasingly, with the rise of ethnic and postcolonial studies and the growing emphasis on diaspora in American studies, the scholarship on sexuality is globalized. Yet thinking simply about global identities does not begin to get at the complex terrain of sexual politics that is at once national, regional, local, even "cross-cultural" and hybrid. In many works on globalization, the "global" is seen either as a homogenizing influence or as a neocolonial movement of ideas and capital from West to non-West. Debates on the nature of global identities have suggested the inadequacy of understanding globalization simply through political economy or through theories of "Western" cultural imperialism and have pushed us to probe further the relationship between globalization and culture. Yet how do we understand these emerging identities, given the divergent theories regarding the relationship between globalization and cultural formations? Can these identities be called "global identities," or is some other term more useful?
In light of the problems that some scholars have pointed out with the rhetoric of diversity and globality with respect to sexual identity, such that these discourses produce a "monumentalist gay identity" and elide "radical sexual difference," the term transnational seems to us more helpful in getting to the specifics of sexualities in postmodernity. As we have argued elsewhere, the term transnational can address the asymmetries of the globalization process. Yet it has become so ubiquitous in cultural, literary, and critical studies that much of its political valence seems to have become evacuated. Is this a function of globalization in its cultural aspects, of the ways in which it has become a truism that everyone and everything are always already displaced and hence "transnational"? Or is it a function of the modernist search for novelty and innovation leading to the adoption of a seemingly new term for a global world? Perhaps these two tendencies are intertwined, and this term works at this point because it has become "real" or "appropriate" in some way that it would do us good to examine. By thinking about the many ways in which the term is being rearticulated, we can understand the rhetorical imperative that underlies such uses. Since terms and critical practices are neither authentic nor pure, we do not wish to argue that one use is more correct than another. Rather, we need to examine the circulation of this term and its regulation through institutional sites, such as academic publishing, conference panels and papers, and academic personnel matters. By doing so, we can begin to understand how the study of sexuality remains bound by disciplinary constraints. A more interdisciplinary and transnational approach that addresses inequalities as well as new formations can begin more adequately to explore the nature of sexual identities in the current phase of globalization.
We can identify several primary ways in which the term transnational does a particular kind of work in the U.S. academy in general. First, it circulates widely as a more useful term to describe migration at the present time. This is the application that we find most often at work in anthropology, for example, in the work that theorizes migration as a transnational process. In emphasizing labor migration, this approach leaves out other factors in the globalization of labor. We can also identify an application in the...
Taking as its point of departure the relationship between migration and globalization, this article highlights the salience of remittances in the national economies of Latin America, especially Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. It looks at the various actors that participate in the transfer of remittances and suggests that incorporating migrant labor dynamics as a category of economic integration will reveal a distinct landscape in the economies of Latin America.
Social Text 20.3 (2002) 117-148
How are gender and sexuality central to the current "war on terrorism"? This question opens on to others: How are the technologies that are being developed to combat "terrorism" departures from or transformations of older technologies of heteronormativity, white supremacy, and nationalism? In what way do contemporary counterterrorism practices deploy these technologies, and how do these practices and technologies become the quotidian framework through which we are obliged to struggle, survive, and resist? Sexuality is central to the creation of a certain knowledge of terrorism, specifically that branch of strategic analysis that has entered the academic mainstream as "terrorism studies." This knowledge has a history that ties the image of the modern terrorist to a much older figure, the racial and sexual monsters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Further, the construction of the pathologized psyche of the terrorist-monster enables the practices of normalization, which in today's context often means an aggressive heterosexual patriotism.
As opposed to initial post-September 11 reactions, which focused narrowly on "the disappearance of women," we consider the question of gender justice and queer politics through broader frames of reference, all with multiple genealogies—indeed, as we hope to show, gender and sexuality produce both hypervisible icons and the ghosts that haunt the machines of war. Thus, we make two related arguments: (1) that the construct of the terrorist relies on a knowledge of sexual perversity (failed heterosexuality, Western notions of the psyche, and a certain queer monstrosity); and (2) that normalization invites an aggressive heterosexual patriotism that we can see, for example, in dominant media representations (for example, The West Wing), and in the organizing efforts of Sikh Americans in response to September 11 (the fetish of the "turbaned" Sikh man is crucial here). The forms of power now being deployed in the war on terrorism in fact draw on processes of quarantining a racialized and sexualized other, even as Western norms of the civilized subject provide the framework through which these very same others become subjects to be corrected. Our itinerary begins with an examination of Michel Foucault's figure of monstrosity as a member of the West's "abnormals," followed by a consideration of the uncanny return of the monster in the discourses of "terrorism studies." We then move to the relationship between these monstrous figures in contemporary forms of heteronormative patriotism. We conclude by offering readings of the terrorism episode of The West Wing and an analysis of South Asian and Sikh American community-based organizing in response to September 11.
To begin, let us consider the monster. Why, in what way, has monstrosity come to organize the discourse on terrorism? First, we could merely glance at the language used by the dominant media in its interested depictions of Islamic militancy. So, as an article in the New York Times points out, "Osama bin Laden, according to Fox News Channel anchors, analysts and correspondents, is 'a dirtbag,' 'a monster' overseeing a 'web of hate.' His followers in Al Qaeda are 'terror goons.' Taliban fighters are 'diabolical' and 'henchmen.'" Or, in another Web article, we read: "It is important to realize that the Taliban does not simply tolerate the presence of bin Laden and his terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. It is part and parcel of the same evil alliance. Al-Qa'ida and the Taliban are two different heads of the same monster, and they share the same fanatical obsession: imposing a strict and distorted brand of Islam on all Muslims and bringing death to all who oppose him."
In these invocations of terrorist-monsters an absolute morality separates good from a "shadowy evil." As if caught up in its own shadow dance with the anti-Western rhetoric of radical Islam, this discourse marks off a figure, Osama bin Laden, or a government, the Taliban, as the opposite of all that is just, human, and good. The terrorist-monster is pure evil and must be destroyed, according to this view. But does the monster have a mind? This begs another question: Do such figures and such representational strategies have a history? We suggest this language of...