Feminism and contemporary decolonization
- By Anasab Atiq
“Life in one subordinate realm of experience
is imprinted by fictions and follies of the dominant realm.” Edward Said’s
unfictionalized truism of colonial constructions is a first facade one faces
when examining the social echelons that have been the products of
colonization. While colonialism has been extensively studied in its montage of
the dichotomy :metropole versus colony ,it was the idea of post colonialism
that with all its chutzpah challenged the equality of the axis and gave
precedence to the ideas, causality and correspondence of the colonized people
and their indignity. With all its gender criticism and gaze, the theory of post
coloniality and colonialism transcended into decoloniality and decolonization
,its theory and praxis not confined to nationalism but driven by the
consciousness of gender, class, caste ,race and other social constructions.
But before delving into that, it is imperative
for a layman to understand the ‘structure
of attitude and references ’that Edward Said has explored extensively in his
theorizing of the European Orient. While this reference had its underpinnings
in the narrative being built by the artists, writers and scholars in the west, was extensively being appropriated and capitalized by the state and non state
actors to give it structure for extraction Green states: Colonialism is
closely tied to racism and sexism. These twin phenomena exist in the context of
colonial society, directed at Indigenous people, but they have also been
internalized by some Indigenous political cultures in ways that are oppressive
to Indigenous women.
The gender question of colonialism bases its
compelling arguments on the historicity of male authority within families and
communities that was constitutive of a formation that allowed the privileging
of certain races over others and was the juncture where colonialism took
roots.The first authors who brought decoloniality as a school of thought were
Anibal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Ramón Grosfoguel and Maria Lugonés, who offered
decoloniality as a school of thought that overcomes postcolonialism. They questioned
the relationship between coloniality and modern rational modernity." The
coloniality of power is the basic and universal social classification of the
population of the planet on the ideas of race, a replacing of inferiors by the superiors through domination
with naturalized understandings of inferiority in terms of gender, class,caste
etc. The feminist discourse largely believed to be a western construct has
essentially been challenged by the alternative discourse aligned with the
colonized, in showing how feminism is not an essentialist but a rather
historical endeavour, continuously taking place under and within the practice
of colonialism in the settler colonies by the indigenous society not as an
import but a struggle to either preserve their own or co-opt into the western
ideas,post independence.According to Grande , “well-documented failures to
engage race acknowledge the complicity of white women in the history of
domination, positions 'mainstream' feminism alongside other colonialist
discourse.Women from minorities or non-Western countries do not need to be
saved from heteropatriarchy or hetero-paternalism within their own communities:
they have already started the process of decolonization a long time ago and
through their own resources, adapted to their culture and their environment.
The feminist concerns of white women, women of
color, and Indigenous women thus often differ and conflict with one another. In
other words, within the context of land and settler colonialism, the issues
facing Indigenous women, are inseparable from the issues facing Indigenous
peoples as a whole, and are resolved via decolonization and sovereignty. Which
is why the idea of feminism has to be looked from a critical caveat,and not in
its ‘white-streamed’ entirety,where
the terms of it are dictated by white women at the cost of ignoring settler
colonialism. Thus the decolonial feminism in its genesis is the the exploration
of the question of performativity of Judith Butler in the context of not
individual modernity but the collective affiliation and social alliances of the
alternative worlds. It is the pursuit of deconstructing Rey Chow’s ‘ascendancy of whiteness’ where the ‘others’ are ‘included’in discourse and historical writing not as spectators or
intruders but as ones, uprooting and rewriting history; because inclusion itself concedes to
heirarchy,the one which we are trying to dismantle.The idea is simple then,the
extant realpolitik is subjected to native gaze,and settler colonialism is seen
not only in an economic vacuum but through the fresco of gender and race. Thus
Native men are not the root cause of Native women's problems; rather, Native
women's critiques implicate the historical and ongoing imposition of colonial,
heteropatriarchal structures onto their societies through contemporary
neoliberalism and appropriations.Native feminist theories make claims not to an
authentic past outside of settler colonialism, but to an ongoing project of
resistance that continues to contest patriarchy and its power relationships in
the context of !politics,land, resources and familial institutions. Decolonial
feminism thus is the effort of effrontery where power is repositioned not only
in terms of white feminism but critically looked at through the experiences
of the colonised and the conscious
subjectivity of their experiences with-out colonialism ,such as through the concept of ‘Declension
Narratives’ relating to feminism by Bulbeck, which argues that colonized women
had status and power which was lost under the white patriarchal rule of
colonialism, such as for example the ancient matriarchies.The goal is to
“identify prevailing structures and practices that create or uphold
disadvantage, inequity, or oppression, and to point the way towards
alternatives that are more egalitarian and just. The trajectory is not elided
through then ,but contested on the nuances of historicities ,where it is
usually obviated how white feminist icons like Betty Friedan and Mary
Wollstonecraft were essentially racist in their feminism ,hence can’t be taken
at their iconic face value.
What should a feminist future then look
like?these theories are simultaneously constructing what Smith compellingly describes as "the history
of the future of sovereignty, what sovereignty could mean for Native
peoples". She has reframed futurity - with Indigenous peoples at the
center. Thus, Smith demonstrates that one of the most radical and necessary
moves toward decolonization requires imagining
a future for Indigenous peoples - a future based on terms of their own
making.For Maile Arvin, decolonization involves regeneration, which she defines
as "desires and practices oriented by transforming settler colonial
dispossession and recreating a people-possessed (rather than an individually
self-possessed) Indigenous future.Engaging Indigenous epistemologies, without
appropriating them or viewing them merely as a mystical metaphor, is a method
of decolonization that could play a significant role in creating a future for
Indigenous peoples and Indigenous ways of knowing.
References:
1.Said, E. W. (2014). Culture and Imperialism.
Random House.
2.Ladner, K. (2009). Gendering
decolonisation,decolonising gender. Australian Indigenous Law Review, 13, 1
3.Arvin, M., Tuck, E., & Morrill, A.
(2013). Decolonizing Feminism: Challenging Connections between Settler
Colonialism and Heteropatriarchy. Feminist Formations, 25(1), 8–34.
4.Ghosh, D. (2004). GENDER AND COLONIALISM:
EXPANSION OR MARGINALIZATION? The Historical Journal, 47(3), 737–755.
5.Lugones, M. (2007). Heterosexualism and the
Colonial/Modern Gender System. Hypatia, 22(1), 186–219.
6.Mohanty, C. T. (2003). Feminism without
Borders. In Duke University Press eBooks.
7.Macleod, C. I., Bhatia, S., & Liu, W.
(2020). Feminisms and decolonising psychology: Possibilities and challenges.
Feminism & Psychology, 30(3), 287–305.
Anasab
Atiq
Bsc H
Chemistry (3rd year)
Miranda
House
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