Decolonial Strategies PDF

Wednesday, 13 November 2024 Strategies Topics- Introduction Coloniality - Proposes the decolonisation of knowledge as an epistemological strategy with political and ethical implications - Possible strategy- “intersectionality” - Coloniality- the lasting effect of colonisation- domination of the world, structure of domination - Subjects of this one direction power are not meant to be, but are active in this action - Problem of unjust relationship of the dominant and the dominated (radical difference of location) - Intersectionality- about location - (Universal, abstract) Individuality- who we are, its the starting point of use of our liberty - (Local, concrete, historical) Singularity - Western, white, man, owner- specific set of social and political relation - The concept of western universality- we are imposing a single way of life of human being, humans in a specific life form- colonially over colonialism - Colonially as “cognitive injustice”: the failure to recognise the different ways of knowing by which people across the globe run their lives and provide meaning to their existence - West modernity marginalised global south - China- global north - To be human is to try to solve the problem of truth and injustice in different ways - The colonised knowledge is possibility to bring back politics - Cosmopolitanism- all humans are member of single community - Poli- the many different - By criticising the wester modernity we evolve to the problem of injustice - Third part of the module- reconstructs the concept of dispossession as means of explaining how shifting configurations of law, property, race, and the rights have functioned as modes of governance, both historically and in the present - Difference between post-colonialioty andde-coloniality is philology, post- transition Coloniality of power and de-colonial thinking W.D. Mignolo, A. Escobar, Globalisation and the Decolonial Option 1 - The book is the work of a research collective that evolved around the notion of "coloniality", understood as the hidden agenda and the darker side of modernity and whose members are based in South America and the United States. The project called for an understanding of modernity not from modernity itself but from its darker side, coloniality, and proposes the de-colonization of knowledge as epistemological restitution with political and ethical implications. Critical project to de-colonial option - The book is the outcome of a workshop. The workshop focused on the following question: what are the differences between de-colonization of knowledge as a critical project and other contemporary critical projects? - What is a critical theory? The reference is to the Frankfurt School (Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno). Frankfurt School condensed a tradition of Jewish critical thinkers in Germany during the early years of Hitler’s regime that although Marxist in spirit was entangled with racism and coloniality in the body. - The Holocaust was a racial crime perpetrated against racialized whites in Europe, applying the same logic that the colonizer had applied to people of color outside of Europe. - While de-coloniality names critical thoughts emerging in the colonies and ex-colonies, Jewish critical traditions in Europe, since the nineteenth century, materialized as the internal responses to European formation of imperial nation-states. - The book intends to be a contribution to the advancement of de-colonial thinking as a particular kind of critical theory and to the de-colonial option as a specific orientation of doing. - Authors assume that critical theory in the Marxist genealogy of thought, as articulated by Frankfurt School, is also a particular kind of critical theory and not the norm or the master paradigm against which all other projects should be compared, measured, evaluated and judged. - Master paradigms are just but options dressed with universal clothes. One of the consequences of de-colonial options is to make clear precisely that master paradigms and abstract universals are still caught in imperial desires. - Authors also assume that ‘history’ is not only linear; and that ‘historical awards’ are only endowed to those who get there first, in the uni-linear chronology of events. There are several histories, all simultaneous histories, inter-connected by imperial and colonial powers, by imperial and colonial differences. - The decolonial option requires a different type of thinking, a non-linear and chronological (but spatial) epistemological break; it requires border epistemology (epistemic disobedience), a non-capitalist political economy, and a pluri-national concept of the state. The De-colonial Manifesto - The de-colonial option opens up as DE-LINKING and negativity from the perspective of the spaces that have been silenced, repressed, demonized, devaluated by the triumphant chant of self-promoting modern epistemology, politics and economy and its internal 2 dissensions (honest liberals, theologians of liberation, post-moderns and poststructuralists, Marxists of different brands). - Coloniality (the colonial matrix of power) shall not be taken as a model, a theory or an object of study. It is necessary to detach oneself from the hegemonic and Eurocentered matrix of knowledge. - The very concept of “coloniality” implies thinking de-colonially (and not for example, “thinking about coloniality”) it is not intended to map a territory to be “studied” from the perspective of sociology, political science, economy, cultural studies or postcolonial studies. - Thinking de-colonially means, precisely, to delink from thinking “disciplinarily” (e.g., sociologically, economically, anthropologically, artistically, etc.). Thinking de-colonially and the de-colonial option are not “new interpretive tools” but an-other thinking grounded in border epistemology. The difference between de-colonial thinking and Marxism - Marxism is a critical and liberating project dwelling in the local history of Europe, in a relatively homogeneous community where workers and factory owners belonged to the same ethnicity and, therefore, Marxism relied on class oppression and the exploitation of labor. - As European economy and political theory expanded and conquered the world, the tools that Marx offered in the analysis of capital are of course useful beyond Europe. However, subjectivities and knowledge in the colonial and ex-colonial world are as important as are divergent from European experiences. From those subjectivities, experience, religions, histories, everyday life, emerged border thinking and de-colonial liberating projects. - Marxism is subsumed and incorporated into parallel but different projects. De-colonial thinking highlights racial discrimination (the hierarchy of human beings, since the sixteenth century, that justified economic and political subordination of people of color and women) and of course also in class exploitation, in the sense that “class” acquired in Europe after the Industrial Revolution. In the colonies workers are colonial subjects of color. - In the heart of the empire (Western Europe and the US), workers are the racialized minorities. Certainly, neo-liberalism is bringing the “celebration” to the white middle class in the US, Germany, and elsewhere and of course, more than ever, to the once existing middle class in some ex-colonial countries. - Marxism and de-colonial projects point toward the same direction, but each has quite different agendas. De-colonial projects cannot be subsumed under Marxist ideology; Marxism should be subsumed under de-colonial projects. - Look at the directionality of the coloniality of power (e.g., the colonial matrix of power), and you will soon realize that Marxism would be an imperial ideology from the left, by imagining that Marxism, instead of Neo-Liberalism or Islamism, is the good abstract universal for the entire humanity. 3 Coloniality and Modernity/ Rationality Coloniality and Global Domination Order - The article Coloniality and Modernity/ Rationality, published in the 90s, is the very matrix of the De-colonial approach - With the conquest of the societies and the cultures which inhabit what today is called Latin America, began the constitution of a new world order, culminating, five hundred years later, in a global power covering the whole planet - This process implied a violent concentration of the world’s resources under the control and for the benefit of a small European minority and above all, of its ruling classes - Although occasionally moderated when faced with the revolt of the dominated, this process has continued ever since - The Eurocentered colonialism, in the sense of a formal system of political domination by Western European societies over others seems a question of the past - Its successor, Western imperialism, is an association of social interests between the dominant groups (“social classes” and/or “ethities”) of countries with unequally articulated power, rather than an imposition from the outside - The specific colonial structure of power produced the specific social discriminations which later were codified as “racial”, “ethnic”, “anthropological” or “national”, according to the times, agents, and populations involved - These intersubjective constructions, product of Eurocentered colonial domination were even assumed to be “objective”, “scientific”, categories, then of a historical significance - That is, as natural phenomena, not referring to the history of power - This power structure was, and still is, the framework within which operate the other social relations or classes or estates - In spite of the fact that political colonialism has been eliminated, the relationship between the European - also called “Western” - culture, and the others, continues to be one of colonial domination - It is not only matter of the subordination of the other cultures to the European, in an external relation; we have also to do with a colonisation of the other cultures, albeit in differing intensities and depths - This relationship consists, in the first place, of a colonisation of the imagination of the dominated; that is, it acts in the interior of that imagination, in a sense, it is a part of it - If my imagination is colonised I’m not aware of it, if I am, I’m no longer colonised - In the beginning colonialism was a product of a systematic repression, not only of the specific beliefs, ideas, images, symbols or knowledge that were not useful to global colonial domination, while at the same time the colonisers were expropriating from the colonised their knowledge, specially in the mining, agriculture, engineering, as well as their products and work - It was followed by the imposition of the use of the rulers’ own patterns of expression, and of their beliefs and images with reference to the supernatural - These beliefs and images served not only to impede the culture production of the dominated, bur also as a very efficient means of social and cultural control, when the immediate repression ceased to be constant and systematic 4 - There is no outside, we can’t imagine good side and bad side of a coin, reality is much more complex than that - Then European culture was made seductive: it gave access to power - After all, beyond repression, the main instrument of all power is its seduction - Cultural Europeanisation was transformed into an aspiration - It was a way of participating and later to reach the same material benefits and the same power as the Europeans - In Latin America, the cultural repression and the colonisation of the imaginary were accompanied by a massive and gigantic extermination of the natives, mainly by their use as expandable labor force, in addition to the violence of the conquest and the diseases brought by Europeans - Coloniality is the corner stone of any global power: Coloniality goes over the age of Colonialism “Race” and Coloniality of Power - Coloniality of power was conceived together with America and Western Europe, and with the social category of ‘race’ as the key element of the social classification of colonized and colonizers. Unlike in any other previous experience of colonialism, the old ideas of superiority of the dominant, and the inferiority of dominated under European colonialism were mutated in a relationship of biologically and structurally superior and inferior. - The process of Eurocentrification of the new world power in the following centuries gave way to the imposition of such a ‘racial’ criteria to the new social classification of the world population on a global scale. So, in the first place, new social identities were produced all over the world: ‘whites’, ‘Indians, ‘Negroes’, ‘yellows’, ‘olives’, using physiognomic traits of the peoples as external manifestations of their ‘racial’ nature. - During European colonial world domination, the distribution of work of the entire world capitalist system, between salaried, independent peasants, independent merchants, and slaves and serfs, was organized basically following the same ‘racial’ lines of global social classification, with all the implications for the processes of nationalization of societies and states, and for the formation of nation-states, citizenship, democracy and so on, around the world. Such distribution of work in the world capitalist system began to change slowly with the struggles against European colonialism, especially after the First World War, and with the changing requirements of capitalism itself. But distribution of work is by no means finished, since Eurocentered coloniality of power has proved to be longer lasting than Eurocentered colonialism. Eurocentrism, cultural colonialiste and modernity/ rationality - During the same period as European colonial domination was consolidating itself, the cultural complex known as European modernity/rationality was being constituted. The intersubjective universe produced by the entire Eurocentered capitalist colonial power was elaborated and formalized by the Europeans and established in the world as an exclusively European product and as a universal paradigm of knowledge and of the relation between humanity and the rest of the world. Such confluence between coloniality and the 5 elaboration of rationality/modernity was not in anyway accidental, as is shown by the very manner in which the European paradigm of rational knowledge was elaborated. - The coloniality of power had decisive implications in the constitution of the paradigm, associated with the emergence of urban and capitalist social relations, which in their turn could not be fully explained outside colonialism and coloniality particularly not as far as Latin America is concerned. European modernity/ rationality and individualism - The very core of European modernity/rationality is individualism: in this paradigm the ‘other’ is present only in an ‘objectivised’ mode. The radical absence of the ‘other’ not only postulates an atomistic image of social existence in general; that is, it denies the idea of the social totality. As European colonial practice was to show, the paradigm also made it possible to omit every reference to any other ‘subject’ outside the European context, i.e., to make invisible the colonial order as totality, at the same moment as the very idea of Europe was establishing itself precisely in relation to the rest of the world being colonized. The emergence of the idea of the ‘West’ or of ‘Europe’, is an admission of identity that is, of relations with other cultural experiences, of differences with other cultures. ‘Subject’ and ‘Object’ - To that ‘European’ or ‘Western’ perception in full formation, those differences were admitted primarily above all as inequalities in the hierarchical sense. the other cultures are different in the sense that they are unequal, in fact inferior, by nature. They only can be ‘objects’ of knowledge or/and of domination practices. From that perspective, the relation between European culture and the other cultures was established and has been maintained, as a relation between ‘subject’ and ‘object’. It blocked, therefore, every relation of communication, of interchange of knowledge and of modes of producing knowledge between the cultures, since the paradigm implies that between ‘subject’ and ‘object’ (the so called Cartesian paradigm) there can be but a relation of externality. How to de-colonize? - The European paradigm of rational knowledge, was not only elaborated in the context of, but as part of, a power structure that involved the European colonial domination over the rest of the world. - The critique of the European paradigm of rationality/modernity is indispensable even more, urgent. But it is doubtful if the criticism consists of a simple negation of all its categories. - Epistemological decolonization, as decoloniality, is needed to clear the way for new intercultural communication, for an interchange of experiences and meanings, as the basis of another rationality which may legitimately pretend to some universality. Nothing is less rational, finally, than the pretension that the specific cosmic vision of a particular ethnie should be taken as universal rationality, even if such an ethnie is called Western Europe because this is actually pretend to impose a provincialism as universalism. 6 The Qujiano’s conclusion - The liberation of intercultural relations from the prison of coloniality also implies the freedom of all peoples to choose, individually or collectively, such relations: a freedom to choose between various cultural orientations, and, above all, the freedom to produce, criticize, change, and exchange culture and society. This liberation is part of the process of social liberation from all power organized as inequality, discrimination, exploitation, and as domination. The Epistemic De-Colonial Turn and the Political-Economy Paradigms - System able to satisfied human needs-no - The concept of richness is connected to the concept of growth - The growth of capital- not only money, the richness of capitalism is not something static, the produce is not oriented to satisfy public needs; produce more capital, not more things, more social orientated capital, social relation of production-needs to be globally exported(?) - Globally orientated- the one that dominates the owners: the globally social way, with which we reproduce our life - Global social reproduction of human life The Epistemic Decolonial Turn Beyond political- economy paradigms - In the so-called Area Studies, theory is still located in the North while the subjects (objects) to be studies are located in the South - By privileging Western thinkers as their central theoretical apparatus, these studies betray their goal to produce subaltern studies - “Turning” means practicing a conscious path change - Stop to produce studies about the subaltern to start to study with and from a subaltern perspective - 2 irreconcilable alternatives: to read subalternity as a postmodern critique (which represents a Eurocentric critique of eurocentrism); to read subalternity as decolonial critique (which represents a critique o eurocentrism from subalternized and silenced knowledges) - If we’re international, we produce something new - Multiculturalism, intercultural approach - A decolonial epistemic perspective requires a broader canon of thought than simply the Western canon (including the Emancipatory Western canon) - A truly universal decolonial perspective cannot be based on an abstract universal (one particular that raises itself as a universal global design), but we would have to be the result of the critical dialogue between diverse critical epistemic/ethical/ political projects towards a pluriversal as oppose to an universal world 7 - Decolonisation of knowledge requires to take seriously the epistemic perspective/ cosmologies/insights of critical thinkers from the Global South thinking from and with subalternized racial/ethnic/sexual spaces and bodies - Decolonial option is not an essentialist, fundamentalist, anti-European critique. It is a critical perspective of both Eurocentric and Third World fundamentalisms, colonialism and nationalism - What all fundamentalisms share (including the Eurocentric one) is the premise that there is only one sole epistemic tradition from which to achieve Truth and Universality Decolonize political-economy - Grosfoguel proposes that an epistemic perspective from racial/ethnic subaltern locations has a lot to contribute to a radical decolonial critical theory beyond the way traditional political-economy paradigms conceptualise capitalism as a global or world system - The idea here is to decolonize political-economy paradigms as well as world-system analysis and to propose an alternative decolonial conceptualisation of the world-system. How? - By an epistemic discussion about the implications of the epistemological critique of feminist and subalternized racial/ethnic intellectuals to western epistemology - By the implications of these critiques to the way we conceptualise the global or world system The contribution of racial/ethnic and feminist subaltern perspectives to epistemological questions - The hegemonic Eurocentric paradigms that have informed western philosophy and sciences in the “modern/colonial, capitalist/patriarchal world-system” for the last 500 years assume a universalistic, neutral, objective point of view - Chicana and black feminist scholars (Moraga & Anzaldua 1983, Collins 1990) as well as third world scholars inside and outside the United States reminded us that we always speak from a particular location in the power structure Toward a situated thinking - Nobody escapes the class, sexual, gender, spiritual, linguistic, geographical, and racial hierarchies of the ‘modern/colonial/ capitalist/ patriarchal world-system’ - As feminist scholar Donna Haraway states, our knowledges are always situated. Black feminist scholars called this perspective ‘afro- centric epistemology’ (which is not equivalent to the afrocentrist perspective) while Latin American Philosopher of Liberation Enrique Russel called it ‘geopolitics of knowledge’ and following Fanon and Anzaldu’s Grosfoguel uses the term ‘body-politics of knowledge’ - This is not only a question about social values in knowledge production or the fact that our knowledge is always partial. The main point here is the locus of enunciation, that is, the geo-political and body-political location of the subject that speaks. In Western philosophy and sciences the subject that speaks is always hidden, concealed, erased from the analysis. 8 The ‘ego-politics of knowledge’ of Western philosophy has always privilege the myth of a non-situated ‘Ego’. - Ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location and the subject that speaks are always decoupled. By delinking ethnic/racial/gender/sexual epistemic location from the subject that speaks, Western philosophy and sciences are able to produce a myth about a Truthful universal knowledge that covers up, that is, conceals who is speaking as well as the geo- political and body-political epistemic location in the structures of colonial power/ knowledge from which the subject speaks. - It is important here to distinguish the ‘epistemic location’ from the ‘social location’. The fact that one is socially located in the oppressed side of power relations, does not automatically mean that he/she is epistemically thinking from a subaltern epistemic location. - Precisely, the success of the modern/colonial world-system consist in making subjects that are socially located in the oppressed side of the colonial difference, to think epistemicaly like the ones on the dominant positions. - Subaltern epistemic perspectives are knowledge coming from below that produces a critical perspective of hegemonic knowledge in the power relations involved. Grosfoguel is not claiming an epistemic populism where knowledge produced from below is automatically an epistemic subaltern knowledge. - What Grosfoguel is claiming is that all knowledges are epistemically located in the dominant or the subaltern side of the power relations and that this is related to the geo- and body-politics of knowledge. The disembodied and unlocated neutrality and objectivity of the ego-politics of knowledge is a Western myth. The political-economy paradigms - Globalization studies, political-economy paradigms and world-system analysis, with only a few exceptions, have not derived the epistemological and theoretical implications of the epistemic critique coming from subaltern locations in the colonial divide and expressed in academia through ethnic studies and woman studies. They still continue to produce knowledge from the Western man ‘point zero’ god-eye view. - This has led to important problems in the way we conceptualize global capitalism and the ‘world-system’. These concepts are in need of decolonization and this can only be achieved with a decolonial epistemology that assumes the decolonial geopolitics and body- politics of knowledge as points of departure to a radical critique. - If we analyze the European colonial expansion from a Eurocentric point of view, what we get is a picture in which the origins of the so-called capitalist world-system is primarily produced by the inter-imperial competition among European Empires. - From this point of view, the capitalist world-system would be primarily an economic system that determine the behavior of the major social actors by the economic logic of making profits as manifested in the extraction of surplus value and the ceaseless accumulation of capital at a world-scale. - The concept of capitalism implied in this perspective privileges economic relations over other social relations. Accordingly, the transformation in the relations of production 9 produces a new class structure typical of capitalism as oppose to other social systems and other forms of domination. Class analysis and economic structural transformations are privileged over other power relations. - Without denying the importance of the endless accumulation of capital at a world scale and the existence of a particular class structure in global capitalism, Grosfoguel raises the following epistemic question: How would the world-system looks like if we move the locus of enunciation from the European man to an Indigenous women in the Americas, to say Rigoberta Menchu in Guatemala or to Domitila in Bolivia? - What Grosfoguel attempts to do is to shift the location from which these paradigms are thinking. The first implication of shifting our geopolitics of knowledge is that what arrived in the Americas in the late fifteenth century was not only an economic system of capital and labor for the production of commodities to be sold for a profit in the world market. This was a crucial part of, but was not the sole element in, the entangled ‘package’. - What arrived in the Americas was a broader and wider entangled power structure that an economic reductionist perspective of the world-system is unable to account for. From the structural location of an indigenous woman in the Americas what arrived was a more complex world-system than what political-economy paradigms and world-system analysis portrait. - European/capitalist/military/christian/patriarchal/white/heterosexual/male arrived in the Americas and established simultaneously in time and space several entangled global hierarchies: - a particular global class formation where a diversity of forms of labor (slavery, semi- serfdom, wage labor, petty-commodity production, etc.) are going to co-exist and be organized by capital as a source of production of surplus value through the selling of commodities for a profit in the world market; - an international division of labor organized trough authoritarian forms distinguishing cores and peripheries; - an inter-state system of politico-military organizations controlled by European males and institutionalized in colonial administrations; - a global racial/ethnic hierarchy that privileges European people over non-European people; - a global gender hierarchy that privileges males over females and European patriarchy over other forms of gender relations; - a sexual hierarchy that privileges heterosexuals over homosexuals and lesbians (it is important to remember that most indigenous peoples in the Americas did not consider sexuality among males a pathological behavior and has no homophobic ideology); - a spiritual hierarchy that privileges Christians over non-Christian/non-Western spiritualities institutionalized in the globalization of the Christian (Catholic and later Protestant) church; - an epistemic hierarchy that privileges Western knowledge and cosmology over non- Western knowledge and cosmologies, and institutionalized in the global university system. - a linguistic hierarchy between European languages and non-European languages that privileges communication and knowledge/theoretical production in the former and subalternize the latter as sole producers of folklore or culture but not of knowledge/theory. 10 What can we discover looking at these multilevel hierarchies? - The old Eurocentric idea that societies develop at the level of the nation-state in terms of a linear evolution of modes of production from pre-capitalist to capitalist is overcome. We are all encompassed within a capitalist world-system that articulates different forms of labor according to the racial classification of the world’s population. - The old paradigm of infrastructure and superstructure is replaced by a historical- heterogeneous structure, that is, an entangled articulation of multiple hierarchies, in which subjectivity and the social imaginary is not derivative but constitutive of the structures of the world-system. In this conceptualization, race and racism are not superstructural or instrumental to an overarching logic of capitalist accumulation; they are constitutive of capitalist accumulation at a world-scale. The ‘colonial power matrix’ is an organizing principle involving exploitation and domination exercised in multiple dimensions of social life, from economic, sexual, or gender relations, to political organizations, structures of knowledge, state institutions, and households. - The old division between culture and political-economy as expressed in post-colonial studies and political-economy approaches is overcome. Post-colonial studies conceptualize the capitalist world-system as being constituted primarily by culture, while political- economy places the primary determination on economic relations. In the ‘coloniality of power’ approach, what comes first, ‘culture or the economy’, is a false dilemma, a chicken-egg dilemma that obscure the complexity of the capitalist world-system. - Coloniality is not equivalent to colonialism. It is not derivative from, or antecedent to, modernity. Coloniality and modernity constitute two sides of a single coin. The same way as the European industrial revolution was achieved on the shoulders of the coerced forms of labor in the periphery, the new identities, rights, laws, and institutions of modernity such as nation-states, citizenship and democracy were formed in a process of colonial interaction with, and domination/exploitation of, non-Western people. - To call ‘capitalist’ the present world-system is, to say the least, misleading. Given the hegemonic Eurocentric ‘common sense’, the moment we use the word ‘capitalism’ people immediately think that we are talking about the ‘economy’. However, ‘capitalism’ is only one of the multiple entangled constellations of colonial power matrix of the ‘European modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system’. It is an important one, but not the only one. Given its entanglement with other power relations, changing the capitalist aspects of the world-system would not be enough to change the present world-system. To transform this world-system it is crucial to destroy the historical-structural heterogenous totality called the ‘colonial power matrix’ of the ‘worldsystem’. - Anti-capitalist decolonization and liberation cannot be reduced to only one dimension of social life. It requires a broader transformation of the sexual, gender, spiritual, epistemic, economic, political, linguistic and racial hierarchies of the modern/colonial world-system. The ‘coloniality of power’ perspective challenges us to think about social change and social transformation in a non-reductionist way 11 Coloniality and the post-fordist capitalism Santiago Catro- Gomez, THE MISSING CHAPTER OF EMPIRE: POSTMODERN REORGANIZATION OF COLONIALITY AND POST-FORDIST CAPITALISM - Is there only one world or are there various possible worlds? - Is it possible to share a single wold where many worlds are possible? - Is it possible to share a world where different ways of knowing that world can coexist and complement each other? A world where epistemological plurality can be recognised and valued? - Author’s answer to these questions is a ‘provisional no’ - To this day, at least for the last 500 years, it has not been possible to recognise the epistemological plurality of the world. On the contrary, a single way of knowing the world, the scientific-technical rationality of the West, has been postulated as the only valid episteme, that is to say the only episteme capable of generating real knowledge about nature, the economy, society, morality and people’s happiness. - All other ways of knowing the world have been relegated to the sphere of doxa, as if they were a part of modern science’s past, and are even considered an ‘epistemological obstacle’ to attaining the certainty of knowledge - We have called this situation “the coloniality of power” - But….nowaday, do we live in a world where the old epistemological hierarchies made rigid by modern colonialism have disappeared, or on the contrary, are we witnessing a postmodern reorganisation of coloniality? - Trying to answer this question, Castr-Gomez analyses the famous book Empire, by Michael Hardy and Antonio Negri because they offered a clear answer to this question - Their thesis is that the modern/colonial hierarchies have disappeared, and that there now exists a unique opportunity for the multitude to generate a plurality of possible worlds in opposition to the single world of Empire - CG’s thesis is that Empire is only a postmodern renewal of the rigid epistemological hierarchies that existed under modernity, making it difficult to think of a radical democracy of the multitude as H/N propose Arguments that H/N offer to support the “death of colonialism in the contemporary world” thesis - The general thesis of H/N is that both imperialism and colonialism have reached their end because they are both specifically modern devices of the exploitation of human labor, and today capital does not need these historical forms to reproduce itself. On the contrary, imperialism and colonialism, which were very useful to the expansion of capital for more that 400 years, these forms were overtaken by the dynamics of the world market itself - H/N associate colonialism directly with the formation of European nation-states in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What the Enlightenment proposed was to legitimate, by way of science, the establishment of disciplinary apparatuses that permitted the normalisation of bodies and minds to orient them towards productive work. But it is 12 precisely in the enlightenment project of normalisation where colonialism fits so well. Constructing the profile of the ‘normal’ subject that capitalism needed (white, male, owner, worker, heterosexual, etc.) necessarily required the image of an ‘other’ located in the exteriority of European space. - The identity of the bourgeois subject is constructed in opposition to the images of ‘savages’ who lived in America, Africa and Asia that chroniclers and travelers had circulated throughout Europe. Therefore, present-day values of ‘civilization’ are af rmed in contrast to the barbaric past in which all that are ‘outside’ live. - In the nineteenth century, once the Fordist mode of production had consolidated its hegemony, colonialism continued to play an important role in the reproduction of capital, thanks to the struggle that arose between the different industrial empires of Europe. In this phase, colonialism is subordinated to the formation of European industrial society and the need to conquer outside markets as a source of resources, a competition that would culminate in the First World War. - From this perspective, colonialism appears as a subproduct of the development of industrial capitalism in certain European nation-states. This situation persisted until well into the twentieth century, until the rst two decades of the Cold War, when the larger part of the colonized countries declared their independence from Europe, in the moment when capitalism started to make the move from a Fordist economy to a post-Fordist mode of production. - H/N’s thesis is that with the advent of postfordism, world capitalism enters into the last and definitive stage of its history: Empire. In the new phase, the type of production that now dominates the world economy is not that of commodities like in industrial society, but that of symbols and abstract language. - It is not the manufacturing of physical objects but the manipulation of data images and symbols that characterizes the post-Fordist economy. This hegemony of immaterial work requires that production stop being tied to specific territories and that the factory is no longer the paradigmatic center of work: Globalization of labor. - In the moment in which knowledge becomes the principal productive force of global capital, replacing the physical labor of slaves and the manual work of the factory, colonialism stops being necessary for the reproduction of capital. There is no longer an ‘outside’ where the categories of ‘colonialism’ and ‘imperialism’ can be applied. - Without centers, without peripheries and without an outside, Empire doesn’t need the representations of the ‘other’ to affirm its identity, because Empire doesn’t have an identity. Empire is smooth and spectral: it is found everywhere, without being located anywhere at that same time. For this reason, affirm H/N, the ‘dialectic of colonialism’ has stopped being functional today. - The principal economic actors of capitalist postmodernism are not nation-states but multinational corporations that do not operate on the basis of settling in specific territories. Uneven development is not territorial , since ‘all the levels of production can exist simultaneously and together [in the same territory], from the highest levels of technology, productivity and accumulation, to the lowest’. - Empire is not English, French, Arab, American or Chinese, but simply capitalist. In Empire, old inequalities and colonial segmentations between the countries have not disappeared but have acquired another form. There are inequalities now that do not have an 13 fi fi imperialist form because both imperialism and colonialism become obstacles for the expansion of capital. Castro-Goméz critiques to H/N - In positive terms, Castro-Gómez thesis is that the concept of Empire allows a critical analysis of global capitalism that supplements, and in some cases replaces, analyses using the concept of imperialism. The numerous critics of the book are correct in that there continue to be imperial rules and actors that are the same as those conceived under the concept of imperialism. However, there are other rules and other global actors becoming hegemonic in the post-Fordist economy that the concept of imperialism fails to grasp. It is here where the concept of Empire reveals its importance. - In negative terms, Castro-Gómez thesis is that the genealogy of Empire, as it is reconstructed by H/N, makes the understanding of the typically modern phenomena that persist in Empire difficult, such as occidentalism, epistemological hierarchies and racism. From Castro-Gómez point of view, the genealogy of Empire proposed by H/N is incomplete and should be complemented with what he calls the ‘missing chapter of Empire’. - Empire is postmodern in the sense that modernity is transformed along with the transformation of coloniality. This step is not given by H/N because to them postcoloniality is a phenomenon that is derivative (and not constitutive) of postmodernity. Their argument leads to the conclusion that for them, postcoloniality means overcoming or the end of coloniality. They do not think or suggest that postcoloniality is the hidden side of postmodernity (as coloniality is the hidden side of modernity), and in this sense, what postcoloniality means is not the end of coloniality but its reorganization. Therefore the postcolonial would be the new and up-to-date forms of coloniality that correspond to the postmodern stage of Occidental history. - We can therefore say that the creators of the concept Empire have a eurocentric vision of the concept that fails to recognize its colonial devices. The ‘missing chapter of Empire’ would have to elaborate a non-Eurocentric genealogy to allow a critique of the new (postmodern) forms of coloniality. Castro-Goméz Proposals - Using the same concept of Empire created by H/N, Castro-Gómez shows how coloniality does not disappear in postmodern capitalism but is reorganized in a postcolonial way. - What happens when immaterial production - no longer the material production associated with industrialization - is placed at the center of the politics of development? - During the sixties and the seventies, the nation-states, supported by studies in the social sciences and especially economics, defined development of Third World countries in reference to the indicators of industrialization. It was assumed that development depended on the promotion of industry, in such a way that underdevelopment necessarily corresponded to a pre-industrial stage of history. 14 - To the «developmentalists», the call for promoting the transition from ‘traditional’ society to ‘modern’ society because they assumed that modernization, is a rehearsal of the old colonial idea according to which underdevelopment was an inferior phase to full development. Development and underdevelopment are two Western ideas. - The Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar has shown that beginning in the 1980s, the idea of industrial development weakened and was replaced by another idea: sustainable development. According to Escobar, it seems the idea of development is losing part of its strength. Its incapacity to carry out its promises, together with resistance from many social movements and many communities is weakening its powerful image; - The authors of critical studies try to give form to this social and epistemological weakening of development by way of their analyses. You could argue that if [industrial] development is losing its push, it is because it is no longer indispensable to the globalization strategies of capital. - This means that certain aspects once considered residual variables of modern developmentalism (like the biodiversity of the planet, the conservation of the environment, and the importance of non-occidental systems of knowing) now become central elements of the global politics of development. - For Escobar, ‘sustainable development’ is nothing more than the postmodern restructuring of modern development. This means that economic development is no longer measured by the material levels of industrialization, but in terms of the capacity of a society to generate and preserve human capital. - Sustainable development is a good example of the way in which the capitalist economy is reorganized in a postmodern way. If we start from the assumption that information and knowledge are the basis of the new global economy, then the lack of access to those resources becomes the key factor in explaining underdevelopment. - Intellectual Property (a juridical concept with a transnational scope) of knowledge of genetic material: by claiming that genetically modified biological material is no longer a product of nature but of human intellect, the multinationals claim the right to patent and declare as their own the economic benefits from the comercialization of these products. - Legitimated in this way by a supranational juridical regime, the intellectual assets administered by multinational corporations are converted into the key sector for the creation of wealth in postmodern capitalism. - Is precisely here where the ‘postcolonial face’ of Empire is revealed. Castro-Gómez is talking about the ways in which new representations of development reinforce the modern/ colonial hierarchies in a postmodern register, establishing a difference between the valid knowledge of some, and the non-knowledge of the others. One example of this is the way in which global agendas of sustainable development approach the subject of ‘traditional knowledge’. Multinational corporations are aware that by association with biodiversity and genetic resources, traditional knowledge and its ‘officials’ acquire a fabulous economic potential and represent numerous opportunities for commercialization. - We know that in the modern paradigm of development, non-occidental systems were seen as the enemies of progress. It was assumed that industrialization created the conditions to leave behind a type of knowledge based in myths and superstitions, replacing it with the technical-scientific knowledge of modernity. It was also believed that personal traits like 15 passivity, lack of discipline and indolence, associated perhaps to defects of race, depended rather on the ‘absence of modernity’. - Postmodern capitalism is presented as a machine of segmentary inclusions, not of exclusions. Non-occidental knowledge is welcomed by the global agendas of Empire because it is useful to the capitalist project of biodiversity. The tolerance of cultural diversity has become a ‘politically correct’ value in Empire, but only in the sense that diversity is useful for the reproduction of capital. The indigenous person, for example, is no longer seen as someone pertaining to the social, economic and cognitive past of humanity, but as the ‘guardian of biodiversity’. Once considered obstacles to a nation’s economic development, the indigenous are now seen as indispensable to the sustainable development of the world. - The colonial hierarchies of knowledge established by modernity, persist and make it difficult to think of a world in which epistemic plurality is recognized and appreciated. Capitalism is a machine that captures the proliferation of possible worlds and expropriates the production of ‘other’ knowledges. Intersectionality María Lugones - María Lugones was an Argentine feminist philosopher, activist, and Professor of Comparative Literature and of women's studies at Carleton College in Northfield (Minnesota) and at Binghamton University in New York State. Lugones, M., "The Coloniality of Gender", in W. d. Mignolo, A. Escobar (eds. by) Globalization and the Decolonial Option, London-New York, Routledge, 2010 (CHAPTER 16). The Inseparability of Race, Class, and Gender in Latino Studies - p. 330: In our estimation, Latino Studies has contributed strongly to this re-enchanment in ways not recognized by Darder and Torres. Their main critique of Latino Studies is what they see as an absence of class analysis. Instead, we would argue that a significant vein of Latino Studies understands colonialism and capitalism as tightly tied historically and conceptually. Capitalism as the system of production of Western modernity was born out of the conquest and colonization of the Americas. - p. 331: In these analyses, we cannot think of class as conceptually separable from race and gender given the history of labor control. Much of contemporary Latino/a Studies has thought of oppressions as intermeshed in such a way that one can not ask which oppression is more fundamental. Darder and Torres acknowledge the interconnection of class, race, and gender. However, they tend to think of class as conceptually separable from race and gender and as more fundamental. While discussing racialized inequality, their text suggests that the racializing processes are epiphenomenal to the economic inequality originated by capital. - p. 331: It is here that work in Latino/a Studies has made its most important contribution by accessing alternative cultural/conceptual systems to those of European modernity. 16 Although there is much left to be done indeed in our re-conceiving of the house of knowledge, this re-conception should not go back to an analysis that centers class as more fundamental and separable from gender, race, or the organization of sexuality. The Coloniality of Gender - p. 369: I am interested in the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality in a way that enables me to understand the indifference that men, but, more importantly to our struggles, men who have been racialized as inferior, exhibit to the systematic violences inflicted upon women of color. I want to understand the construction of this indifference so as to make it unavoidably recognizable by those claiming to be involved in liberatory struggles. - p. 369: Women of Color feminists have made clear what is revealed in terms of violent domination and exploitation once the epistemological perspective focuses on the intersection of these categories. But that has not seemed sufficient to arouse in those men who have themselves been targets of violent domination and exploitation, any recognition of their complicity or collaboration with the violent domination of women of color. In particular, theorizing global domination continues to proceed as if no betrayals or collaborations of this sort need to be acknowledged and resisted. - p. 370: The intent of this writing is to make visible the instrumentality of the colonial/ modern gender system in subjecting us — both women and men of color —in all domains of existence. But it is also the project’s intent to make visible the crucial disruption of bonds of practical solidarity. My intent is to provide a way of understanding, of reading, of perceiving our allegiance to this gender system. We need to place ourselves in a position to call each other to reject this gender system as we perform a transformation of communal relations. - p. 370: Quijano understands that all power is structured in relations of domination, exploitation and conflict as social actors fight over control of “the four basic areas of human existence: sex, labor, collective authority and subjectivity/intersubjectivity, their resources and products". - p. 370: This is too narrow an understanding of the oppressive modern/colonial constructions of the scope of gender. Quijano’s lenses also assume patriarchal and heterosexual understandings of the disputes over control of sex, its resources, and products. Quijano accepts the global, Eurocentered, capitalist understanding of what gender is about. These features of the framework serve to veil the ways in which non-“white” colonized women were subjected and disempowered. - p. 371: Gender does not need to organize social arrangements, including social sexual arrangements. But gender arrangements need not be either heterosexual or patriarchal. They need not be, that is, as a matter of history. Understanding these features of the organization of gender in the modern/colonial gender system—the biological dimorphism, the patriarchal and heterosexual organizations of relations—is crucial to an understanding of the differential gender arrangements along “racial” lines. - p. 371: Quijano seems not to be aware of his accepting this hegemonic meaning of gender. In making these claims I aim to expand and complicate Quijano’s approach, preserving his understanding of the coloniality of power, which is at the center of what I am calling the “modern/colonial gender system.” 17 - p. 371: The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of “race.” (Quijano, 2001-2, p.1) The invention of “race” is a pivotal turn as it replaces the relations of superiority and inferiority established through domination. It re-conceives humanity and human relations fictionally, in biological terms. - pp. 372-373: The cognitive needs of capitalism and the naturalizing of the identities and relations of coloniality and of the geocultural distribution of world capitalist power have guided the production of this way of knowing. The cognitive needs of capitalism include “measurement, quantification, externalization (or objectification) of what is knowable with respect to the knower so as to control the relations among people and nature and among them with respect to it, in particular the property in means of production.” This way of knowing was imposed on the whole of the capitalist world as the only valid rationality and as emblematic of modernity. - p. 373: Intersectionality reveals what is not seen when categories such as gender and race are conceptualized as separate from each other. The move to intersect the categories has been motivated by the difficulties in making visible those who are dominated and victimized in terms of both categories. Though everyone in capitalist Eurocentered modernity is both raced and gendered, not everyone is dominated or victimized in terms of them. Crenshaw and other women of color feminists have argued that the categories have been understood as homogenous and as picking out the dominant in the group as the norm, thus “women” picks out white bourgeois women, “men” picks out white bourgeois men, “black” picks out black heterosexual men, and so on. It becomes logically clear then that the logic of categorial separation distorts what exists at the intersection, such as violence against women of color. - p. 375: Though I have not found a characterization of gender in what I have read of his work, Quijano seems to me to imply that gender difference is constituted in the disputes over control of sex, its resources, and products. Differences are shaped through the manner in which this control is organized. Sex, he understands, as biological attributes that become elaborated as social categories. He contrasts the biological quality of sex with phenotype, which does not include differential biological attributes. “The color of one’s skin, the shape of one’s eyes and hair “do not have any relation to the biological structure.” (Quijano, 2000b, 373) Sex, on the other hand seems unproblematically biological to Quijano. - p. 375: Quijano appears to take it for granted that the disputes over control of sex is a dispute among men, about men’s control of resources who are thought to be female. Men do not seem understood as the “resources” in sexual encounters. Women are not thought to be disputing for control over sexual access. The differences are thought of in terms of how society reads reproductive biology. - p. 376: The assignations reveal that what is understood to be biological sex, is socially constructed. During the late nineteenth century until WWI, reproductive function was considered a woman’s essential characteristic. The presence or absence of ovaries was the ultimate criterion of sex. (113) But there are a large number of factors that can enter in “establishing someone’s ‘official’ sex:” chromosomes, gonads, external morphology, internal morphology, hormonal patterns, phenotype, assigned sex, self-identified sex. (112) At present, chromosomes and genitalia enter into the assignment, but in a manner that reveals biology is thoroughly interpreted and itself surgically constructed. 18 - p. 377: It is important to see that not all different traditions correct and normalize inter- sexed people. So, as with other assumption characteristics it is important to ask how sexual dimorphism served and serves Eurocentered global capitalist domination/exploitation. - p. 378: Oyewumi understands gender as introduced by the West as a tool of domination that designates two binarily opposed and hierarchical social categories. Women (the gender term) is not defined through biology, though it is assigned to anafemales. Women are defined in relation to men, the norm. Women are those who do not have a penis; those who do not have power; those who cannot participate in the public arena. (34) None of this was true of Yoruba anafemales prior to colonization. See The Invention of Women (1997) by Oyéronké Oyewùmí. - p. 384: In the development of twentieth century feminisms, the connection between gender, class, heterosexuality as racialized was not made explicit. That feminism centered its struggle and its ways of knowing and theorizing against a characterization of women as fragile, weak in both body and mind, secluded in the private, and sexually passive. But it did not bring to consciousness that those characteristics only constructed white bourgeois womanhood. Indeed, beginning from that characterization, white bourgeois feminists theorized white womanhood as if all women were white. Intersectionality 2 Gender, Race, and Class- Kimberlé Crenshaw - Canton, Ohio 1959) Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is an American lawyer, civil rights advocate, philosopher, and a leading scholar of critical race theory. She is a full-time professor at the UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) School of Law and Columbia Law School. - Crenshaw, K., "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex" (1989) - Crenshaw, K., "Mapping the Margins - Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women" (1991) - The Combahee River Collective Statement 1977 by Combahee River Collective - Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” 1989 “Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects. It’s not simply that there’s a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LGBTQ problem there. Many times that framework erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things.” Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw "Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More than Two Decades Later” 19 "THE COMBAHEE RIVER COLLECTIVE STATEMENT" (1977) - COMBAHEE RIVER COLLECTIVE The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face. 1. The genesis of Contemporary Black Feminism Before looking at the recent development of Black feminism we would like to affirm that we find our origins in the historical reality of Afro-American women’s continuous life-and- death struggle for survival and liberation. Black women’s extremely negative relationship to the American political system (a system of white male rule) has always been determined by our membership in two oppressed racial and sexual castes. "THE COMBAHEE RIVER COLLECTIVE STATEMENT" (1977) As Angela Davis points out in “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” Black women have always embodied, if only in their physical manifestation, an adversary stance to white male rule and have actively resisted its inroads upon them and their communities in both dramatic and subtle ways. There have always been Black women activists — some known, like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. Wells Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell, and thousands upon thousands unknown — who have had a shared awareness of how their sexual identity combined with their racial identity to make their whole life situation and the focus of their political struggles unique. A Black feminist presence has evolved most obviously in connection with the second wave of the American women’s movement beginning in the late 1960s. Black, other Third World, and working women have been involved in the feminist movement from its start, but both outside reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement itself have served to obscure our participation. In 1973, Black feminists, primarily located in New York, felt the necessity of forming a separate Black feminist group. This became the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO). Black feminist politics also have an obvious connection to movements for Black liberation, particularly those of the 1960s and 1970s. Many of us were active in those movements (Civil Rights, Black nationalism, the Black Panthers), and all of our lives Were greatly affected and changed by their ideologies, their goals, and the tactics used to achieve their goals. It was our experience and disillusionment 20 within these liberation movements, as well as experience on the periphery of the white male left, that led to the need to develop a politics that was anti- racist, unlike those of white women, and anti-sexist, unlike those of Black and white men. There is also undeniably a personal genesis for Black Feminism, that is, the political realization that comes from the seemingly personal experiences of individual Black women’s lives. Black feminists and many more Black women who do not define themselves as feminists have all experienced sexual oppression as a constant factor in our day-to-day existence. As children we realized that we were different from boys and that we were treated differently. For example, we were told in the same breath to be quiet both for the sake of being “ladylike” and to make us less objectionable in the eyes of white people. Our development must also be tied to the contemporary economic and political position of Black people. The post World War II generation of Black youth was the first to be able to minimally partake of certain educational and employment options, previously closed completely to Black people. Although our economic position is still at the very bottom of the American capitalistic economy, a handful of us have been able to gain certain tools as a result of tokenism in education and employment which potentially enable us to more effectively fight our oppression. A combined anti-racist and anti-sexist position drew us together initially, and as we developed politically we addressed ourselves to heterosexism and economic oppression under capItalism. This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough. We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women’s lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression. SEPARATIVISM ALLIANCE SOLIDARITY Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand. Our situation as Black people necessitates that we have solidarity around the fact of race, which white women of course do not need to have with white men, unless it is their negative solidarity as racial oppressors. We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism. 21 We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation. We have arrived at the necessity for developing an understanding of class relationships that takes into account the specific class position of Black women who are generally marginal in the labor force, while at this particular time some of us are temporarily viewed as doubly desirable tokens at white-collar and professional levels. We need to articulate the real class situation of persons who are not merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives. Although we are in essential agreement with Marx’s theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women. 6 As we have already stated, we reject the stance of Lesbian separatism because it is not a viable political analysis or strategy for us. It leaves out far too much and far too many people, particularly Black men, women, and children. We have a great deal of criticism and loathing for what men have been socialized to be in this society: what they support, how they act, and how they oppress. But we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per see — i.e., their biological maleness — that makes them what they are. As BIack women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic. We must also question whether Lesbian separatism is an adequate and progressive political analysis and strategy, even for those who practice it, since it so completely denies any but the sexual sources of women’s oppression, negating the facts of class and race. 3. Problems in Organizing Black Feminists The major source of difficulty in our political work is that we are not just trying to fight oppression on one front or even two, but instead to address a whole range of oppressions. We do not have racial, sexual, heterosexual, or class privilege to rely upon, nor do we have even the minimal access to resources and power that groups who possess anyone of these types of privilege have. 4. Black Feminist Issues and Projects During our time together we have identified and worked on many issues of particular relevance to Black women. The inclusiveness of our politics makes us concerned with any situation that impinges upon the lives of women, Third World and working people. We are of course particularly committed to working on those struggles in which race, sex, and class are simultaneous factors in oppression. One issue that is of major concern to us and that we have begun to publicly address is racism in the white women’s movement. 22 As Black feminists we are made constantly and painfully aware of how little effort white women have made to understand and combat their racism, which requires among other things that they have a more than superficial comprehension of race, color, and Black history and culture. Eliminating racism in the white women’s movement is by definition work for white women to do, but we will continue to speak to and demand accountability on this issue. "DEMARGINALIZING THE INTERSECTION OF RACE AND SEX" (1989) SUBTITLE: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics pp. 139-140: In this talk, I want to examine how this tendency is perpetuated by a single-axis framework that is dominant in antidiscrimination law and that is also reflected in feminist theory and antiracist politics. I will center Black women in this analysis in order to contrast the multidimensionality of Black women's experience with the single-axis analysis that distorts these experiences. Not only will this juxtaposition reveal how Black women are theoretically erased, it will also illustrate how this framework imports its own theoretical limitations that undermine efforts to broaden feminist and antiracist analyses. With Black women as the starting point, it becomes more apparent how dominant conceptions of discrimination condition us to think about subordination as disadvantage occurring along a single categorical axis. I want to suggest further that this single-axis framework erases Black women in the conceptualization, identification and remediation of race and sex discrimination by limiting inquiry to the experiences of otherwise-privileged members of the group. In other words, in race discrimination cases, discrimination tends to be viewed in terms of sex- or class- privileged Blacks; in sex discrimination cases, the focus is on race- and class-privileged women. p. 140: These problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure. Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated. DeGraffenreid v General Motors p. 141: In DeGraffenreid, five Black women brought suit against General Motors, alleging that the employer's seniority system perpetuated the effects of past discrimination against Black women. Evidence adduced at trial revealed that General Motors simply did not hire Black women prior to 1964 and that all of the Black women hired after 1970 lost their jobs in a seniority-based layoff during a subsequent recession. The district court granted summary judgment for the defendant, rejecting the plaintiffs' attempt to bring a suit not on behalf of Blacks or women, but specifically on behalf of Black women. 23 p. 141: The court stated: [P]laintiffs have failed' to cite any decisions which have stated that Black women are a special class to be protected from discrimination. The Court's own research has failed to disclose such a decision. The plaintiffs are clearly entitled to a remedy if they have been discriminated against. However, they should not be allowed to combine statutory remedies to create a new 'super- remedy' which would give them relief beyond what the drafters of the relevant statutes intended. Thus, this lawsuit must be examined to see if it states a cause of action for race discrimination, sex discrimination, or alternatively either, but not a combination of both. p. 142: After refusing to consider the plaintiffs' sex discrimination claim, the court dismissed the race discrimination complaint and recommended its consolidation with another case alleging race discrimination against the same employer. The plaintiffs responded that such consolidation would defeat the purpose of their suit since theirs was not purely a race claim, but an action brought specifically on behalf of Black women alleging race and sex discrimination. The court, however, reasoned: "The legislative history surrounding Title VII does not indicate that the goal of the statute was to create a new classification of 'black women' who would have greater standing than, for example, a black male. The prospect of the creation of new classes of protected minorities, governed only by the mathematical principles of permutation and combination, clearly raises the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora's box." pp. 142-143: The court's refusal in DeGraffenreid to acknowledge that Black women encounter combined race and sex discrimination implies that the boundaries of sex and race discrimination doctrine are defined respectively by white women's and Black men's experiences. Under this view, Black women are protected only to the extent that their experiences coincide with those of either of the two groups.' p. 145: Discrimination against a white female is thus the standard sex discrimination claim; claims that diverge from this standard appear to present some sort of hybrid claim. More significantly, because Black females' claims are seen as hybrid, they sometimes cannot represent those who may have "pure" claims of sex discrimination. The effect of this approach is that even though a challenged policy or practice may clearly discriminate against all females, the fact that it has particularly harsh consequences for Black females places Black female plaintiffs at odds with white females. p. 153: In 1851, Sojourner Truth declared "Ain't I a Woman?" and challenged the sexist imagery used by male critics, to justify the disenfranchisement of women." The scene was a Women's Rights Conference in Akron, Ohio; white male hecklers, invoking stereotypical images of "womanhood," argued that women were too frail and delicate to take on the responsibilities of political activity. When Sojourner Truth rose to speak, many white women urged that she be silenced, fearing that she would divert attention from women's suffrage to emancipation. Truth, once permitted to speak, recounted the horrors of slavery, and its particular impact on Black women: 24 "Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me - and ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it- and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have born thirteen children, and seen most of 'em sold into slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me - and ain't I a woman?" p. 154: The value of feminist theory to Black women is diminished because it evolves from a white racial context that is seldom acknowledged. Not only are women of color in fact overlooked, but their exclusion is reinforced when white women speak for and as women. The authoritative universal voice - usually white male subjectivity masquerading as non- racial, non-gendered objectivitys - is merely transferred to those who, but for gender, share many of the same cultural, economic and social characteristics. p. 157-158: Rape statutes generally do not reflect male control over female sexuality, but white male regulation of white female sexuality. Historically, there has been absolutely no institutional effort to regulate Black female chastity. Also, while it was true that the attempt to regulate the sexuality of white women placed unchaste women outside the law's protection, racism restored a fallen white woman's chastity where the alleged assailant was a Black man. No such restoration was available to Black women. pp. 158-159: The singular focus on rape as a manifestation of male power over female sexuality tends to eclipse the use of rape as a weapon of racial terror. When Black women were raped by white males, they were being raped not as women generally, but as Black women specifically: Their femaleness made them sexually vulnerable to racist domination, while their Blackness effectively denied them any protection." This white male power was reinforced by a judicial system in which the successful conviction of a white man for raping a Black woman was virtually unthinkable. p. 166: Neither Black liberationist politics nor feminist theory can ignore the intersectional experiences of those whom the movements claim as their respective constituents. In order to include Black women, both movements must distance themselves from earlier approaches in which experiences are relevant only when they are related to certain clearly identifiable causes (for example, the oppression of Blacks is significant when based on race, of women when based on gender). "MAPPING THE MARGINS - INTERSECTIONALITY, IDENTITY POLITICS, AND VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN" (1991) p. 1241-1242: This process of recognizing as social and systemic what was formerly perceived as isolated and individual has also characterized the identity politics of African Americans, other people of color, and gays and lesbians, among others. For all these groups, 25 identity-based politics has been a source of strength, community, and intellectual development. p. 1242: The embrace of identity politics, however, has been in tension with dominant conceptions of social justice. Race, gender, and other identity categories are most often treated in mainstream liberal discourse as vestiges of bias or domination - that is, as intrinsically negative frameworks in which social power works to exclude or marginalize those who are different. According to this understanding, our liberatory objective should be to empty such categories of any social significance. Yet implicit in certain strands of feminist and racial liberation movements, for example is the view that the social power in delineating difference need not be the power of domination; it can instead be the source of social empowerment and reconstruction. p. 1242: The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences. In the context of violence against women, this elision of difference in identity politics is problematic, fundamentally because the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class. Moreover, ignoring difference within groups contributes to tension among groups, another problem of identity politics that bears on efforts to politicize violence against women. Feminist efforts to politicize experiences of women and antiracist efforts to politicize experiences of people of color have frequently proceeded as though the issues and experiences they each detail occur on mutually exclusive terrains. Although racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices. And so, when the practices expound identity as woman or person of color as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of color to a location that resists telling. p. 1244: I should say at the outset that intersectionality is not being offered here as some new, totalizing theory of identity. Nor do I mean to suggest that violence against women of color can be explained only through the specific frameworks of race and gender considered here. Indeed, factors I address only in part or not at all, such as class or sexuality, are often as critical in shaping the experiences of women of color. My focus on the intersections of race and gender only highlights the need to account for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed. BIBLIOGRAPHY Combahee River Collective, The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) Angela Davis, Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves (1972) Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (ed. by), How we get free (2017) 26 Sandro Mezzadra Sandro Mezzadra teaches political theory at the university of Bologna. His scholarly work has centered on borders and migration, contemporary capitalism and globalization, Marx and workerism. With Brett Neilson he is the author of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Duke University Press, 2013) and of The Politics of Operations. Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2019). Mezzadra, S., "Intersectionality, Identity, and the Riddle of Class" (2021) "INTERSECTIONALITY, IDENTITY, AND THE RIDDLE OF CLASS" (2021) p. 2: While identity is of course a fundamental category in European philosophy at least since Aristotle, its politicization is a much more recent phenomenon. One can say that it is only in the second half of the 20th century that the development of cultural anthropology and sociology lays the theoretical ground for such a politicization, which is unconceivable without taking into account the emergence in many parts of the world of feminist movements as well as of a panoply of struggles against racial domination and for the rights of “minorities”. p. 2: Claims based upon identity played an important role in denouncing the presumed “neutrality” and even universalism of political institutions and in shedding light on the continuity of past histories of conquest and domination. p. 2: More generally, identity provided a language for the articulation of claims and desires for liberation of a multiplicity of subjects whose oppression was predicated upon specific systems of oppression that were not targeted as such by established traditions of emancipatory politics. Struggles of racialized people or sexual minorities are good instances in this respect as well as claims proliferating within feminism along the lines that fracture the unitary figures of “the woman” and “universal sisterhood”. p. 2: From this point of view, it is not surprising that one of the first polemical targets of identity politics was the concept of class and class politics. If one takes class as a collective subject (and even as a collective identity) whose unity and homogeneity are immediately given as an “objective” outcome of the relations of production, it is easy to see that there is no space here for a politics capable to grasp claims and movements articulated in specific terms — be it in gender or racial terms. p. 2: Take for instance B.R. Ambedkar, the great spokesperson of the Dalits in colonial India. In the late 1920s he had several debates with the leaders of the Communist Party of India, always pointing to the peculiarity of the position of the Dalits and to the spread of practices of untouchability in the world of labor and emphasizing the need to give priority to those questions in labor politics. This is precisely what Communist leaders did not want to accept, leading to a split with Ambedkar. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar 27 (Mhow Cantonment, 1891 – Delhi, 1956) The Annihilation of Caste (1936) “Buddha or Karl Marx” (1956) p. 3: At the same time, my argument is inspired by a theoretical and political concern with the main forms of contemporary identity politics, which are nurtured by such notions as “white privilege” and by “decolonial” language and theories (Mezzadra, 2021: 30-33). While I remain wary of the moralistic tones of identity politics today, what troubles me more is the tendency to simply affirm a subaltern identity as a closed and bordered one (often in the framework of a race to establish that identity as the most oppressed and humiliated). This makes alliances, convergences, and coalitions — as well as opposition — ultimately impossible (Haider, 2018: 40). p. 3: It is against this background that I ask in the last section of the essay whether it is possible, and even necessary, to rethink the very concept of class to open up a different political perspective for struggles and movements as the ones that are at the center of theories of intersectionality. Needless to say, this requires going beyond the traditional notion of class that I have sketched above, I admit, providing a kind of caricature. NI UNA MENOS NON UNA DI MENO (NUDM) COORDINADORA FEMINISTA 8M (CF8M) p. 3: In Argentina and Brazil, the notion of intersectionality is used to articulate and connect the movements and claims of indigenous and black women, rural and metropolitan communities, sexual minorities and women living in slums, without losing sight of their specificity, while in Italy and Spain it allows addressing issues of migration, colonialism, and sexuality. In a way, one can say that this appropriation and these uses of intersectionality prompted a re-politicization of the notion, where what is at stake, to quote the words of Angela Davis, is “not so much intersectionality of identities but intersectionality of struggles”. ” (Davis, 2016: 144). Interestingly, this notion of intersectionality also played outstanding roles in the debates within the massive movement for black lives and against police brutality in the United States in the summer of 2020. p. 3: I spoke of a re-politicization of intersectionality because over the last years in the United States the notion had become a kind of standard academic reference and its original political imprint had been to some extent neutralized (which does not mean of course that there were not many scholars continuing to do a very interesting and even radical work in the framework of intersectionality). p. 4: (Referring to Crenshaw and De Graffenreid v. General Motors) The interplay of those boundaries effectively obscures and deletes a specific subjective experience within the ranks of workers, the one of black women. In focusing on such a neglected difference, 28 intersectionality sets out to shed light on the parallel working of systems of oppression and domination that hierarchize the working class. p. 4: While writings from the early stage of Black feminist thought (including such important names as Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells-Barnett) compose an important archive for anybody interested in the genealogy and prehistory of intersectionality (Gines, 2014), I would like to shortly dwell here on the debates about the condition of the Black proletarian woman in the Communist Party of the U.S.A. in the 1930s and in the 1940s. In the writings of Louise Thompson and Claudia Jones the questions of race and sex are indeed discussed from the point of view of the concept of exploitation, which will be later marginalized in the intersectional debate. Louise Thompson Patterson (Chicago, 1901 – New York, 1999) "Toward a Brighter Dawn" (1936) pp. 4-5: Writing in 1936, Louise Thompson provides in Toward a Brighter Dawn a striking analysis of the condition of black women, focusing on a “Southern road,” on “the plantations in the South”, and on “Bronx Park, New York”. The legacy of slavery runs through the whole article, which finds a dramatic apex in the description of the predicament of black domestic workers in the Bronx. Thompson speaks of a “slave market” in the Bronx, and casts it as a “graphic monument to the bitter exploitation of this most exploited section of the American working population – the Negro women.” And this is because they “meet this triple exploitation – as workers, as women, and as Negroes” (Thompson, 1936). Claudia Jones An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman! (1949) p. 5: Her An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman! (1949) starts with an emphasis on the growth in the militant participation of black women “in all aspects of the struggle for peace, civil rights and economic security” (ibidem). It is in front of this intensified militancy that Jones calls for a new understanding of the role of black women and for an end to the neglect of that role permeating the labor movement. p. 5: Even the experience of exploitation is hierarchized, as black women clearly demonstrate. As Jones writes, “not equality, but degradation and super-exploitation: this is the actual lot of Negro women!” p. 5: “Triple exploitation” and “super-exploitation,” the concepts introduced by Linda Thompson and Claudia Jones, are clearly attempts to use a Marxist language to come to terms with the specific condition of black working women. The proposed diversification and even hierarchization of exploitation raise however several problems. This is particularly the case 29 when the notion of exploitation is understood in purely economistic terms and strictly connected to a narrow interpretation of “productive labor”. Such an economistic concept of exploitation has long been prevailing in Marxism, including in the United States, and it allowed a subordination of all forms of oppression (for instance, in Thompson’s words, oppression “as women, and as Negroes”) to exploitation itself (“as workers”) and to the related class politics. Consequently, several activists and scholars began to underscore the autonomy of those systems of oppression (say, sexism and racism) and to prioritize struggles against them, in many cases completely obscuring the relevance of exploitation. This is what characterizes the mainstream of debates on intersectionality, which are often shaped by a conceptual opposition between oppression and exploitation. p. 6: Nevertheless, it is important to remind that the notion of oppression in intersectional debates is characterized by an emphasis on “irreducibility” (of the single systems of oppression), which goes hand in hand with an emphasis on “simultaneity,” i.e. with the claim that those systems “are experienced simultaneously and are inseparable” (Carasthatis, 2016: 57). There is a clear tension here, and while the critique of “single axis” thinking is a constitutive moment for theories of intersectionality, one can say that the principle of “irreducibility” has often tended to obscure the one of “simultaneity”. "THE COMBAHEE RIVER COLLECTIVE STATEMENT" (1977) We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women’s lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression. p. 6: What is at stake here is the risk of an identity politics that takes the specificity of a system of oppression as an exclusive framework not only for analysis but also for the process of subject constitution. The point is not to propose as an alternative a hierarchization of oppressions and consequently of struggles and claims, which is anathema to theories of intersectionality. It is rather to shift attention to the unitary moment in the working of systems of domination and oppression and to work toward the establishment of spaces of convergence for diverse and heterogeneous subjects. A focus on a specific system of oppression can well be an important moment in a process of subjectivation, even necessary to break processes of marginalization and to open up new vistas of liberation. Nevertheless, when the “identity” forged by such focus becomes frozen it paradoxically risks replicating the boundaries of the specific system of oppression it sets out to contest. And it becomes an obstacle to wider processes of subjectivation. SUBJECTIVATION IDENTITY 30 IDENTITY POLITICS PRIVILEGE ALLY COALITION INTERSECTIONAL COALITION STRATEGIC ESSENTIALISM Strategic essentialism is a strategy by which differences (within a group) are temporarily downplayed and unity assumed for the sake of achieving political goals. It is a major concept in postcolonial theory, was introduced in the 1980s by the Indian literary critic and theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. (Calcutta, 1942) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999) p. 7: While in this case the subjectivity and identity of the collectives involved remain untouched, an intersectional coalition is a space of convergence for a multitude of diverse and heterogeneous people, within which new subjectivities and even identities are continuously fabricated in a common struggle for liberation. Needless to say, the very unity of a coalition is not given in advance, it is itself at stake in this process of subjectivation. p. 7: The critique of the economistic notion of exploitation that I sketched above led to a marginalization of class, and even capitalism, in many debates on intersectionality. As it happened in cultural and postcolonial studies (Mezzadra, 2011), capital and capitalism were confined to the realm of “economy” while class was often identified with white, male, heterosexual workers in a standard employment relation. Differential systems of oppression like sexism and racism were considered to operate at the margins of capitalism, which could definitely instrumentalize the processes of hierarchization generated by them without ceasing to remain a fundamentally homogenizing power. I am convinced that such an understanding of capitalism is deeply flawed, and that a different way to look at the history and contemporary working of capitalism could provide us with an effective way to tackle the question of the “simultaneity” of systems of oppression raised by theories of intersectionality. pp. 7-8: What is at stake here is what we can call the production of subjectivity that is required for the very existence of that commodity (labor power). The differential fabrication of hierarchized bodies, where systems of oppression like sexism and racism have prominent roles to play, emerges as a crucial moment in the production of labor power as a commodity, which is according to Marx the cornerstone upon which no less than the existence of capitalism is predicated. The very boundary between production and reproduction, as well as between productive and unproductive labor appears tested and blurred from this point of view. And it is easy to see that a merely economistic understanding of capitalism and exploitation becomes untenable. 31 The moment that I called of a production of subjectivity has rather multiple dimensions that must be acknowledged as internal to exploitation. We are confronted here with a panoply of (exploited) subjective figures, whose experience of oppression and exploitation is definitely mediated by different subject positions (where for instance racism, sexism, or heteronormativity can be prevailing) while their “simultaneity” is orchestrated by the operations of capital. p. 8: Class is today composed by this multitude of differences living, toiling, and struggling under the pressure of capital’s exploitation. Multiplicity is the hallmark of class. While I emphasize the relevance of a non-economistic notion of exploitation for rethinking class today, there is a need to add that class politics today requires a panoply of movements and struggles that go well beyond the boundaries of class. Once we acknowledge the constitutive relevance for the working of exploitation of, say, racism and sexism, mobilizations against them, which may well include people who are not “exploited,” are of the utmost importance —and can never be considered as addressing a kind of “secondary” contradiction —. Parallel to such transversal struggles there is a need to forge and practice new forms of solidarity and spaces of convergence, where intersectionality becomes a method for a multiplicity of encounters and for counteracting any ossification of identity politics. p. 8: The notion of class, a “multitudinous class” or a “intersectional class” to put it with Michael Hardt and Toni Negri (2019: 84), provides a subjective name to that base and opens new lines of investigation and political intervention. And the reinvention of intersectionality that I mentioned above (as an “intersectionality of struggles”, to remind the words of Angela Davis) seems to foreshadow a new politics of solidarity and even a new class politics. Epistemologies of the South as Political Strategies Epistemologies of Knowledges Creating a Distance in Relation to Western-centric Political Imagination and Critical Theory - The GLOBAL NORTH is getting smaller and smaller in economic as well as political and cultural terms, and yet it cannot make sense of the world at large other than through general theories and universal ideas. - The truth of t

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