Decolonial Feminisms & Cinema as Ritual: An Open Syllabus

My long project is an open syllabus bringing together texts and films that theorize and/or demonstrate decolonial feminist praxis within a primarily Latin American focus. Hosted via the CUNY commons, the syllabus is meant to be experienced interactively online (and hopefully through facilitated in-person spaces down the line, as well). There is an emphasis on this syllabus being open-access and presented non-traditionally. It invites participants to engage with it at their own pace, and on a personal level, as if becoming a ritual itself for the participants themselves.

1. Key texts and my theoretical framework(s):

Working from the understanding that much of our current academic disciplines have been organized from the perspective of post-Enlightenment conceptions of modernity, capitalism, as well as patriarchy, I turn to the works of decolonial feminist thinkers like Maria Lugones, Sylvia Wynter, Gloria Anzaldua, Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty as interventions in this paradigm. I define decolonial feminist praxis here as one that is committed to the process of untethering from strictly linear, colonial, capitalist, masculinist, and extractive forms of knowledge production. A few texts I plan to include are:

• Maria Lugones’s “Coloniality of Gender” as an important framework for understanding how formations of gender and sexuality emerge from coloniality in Latin America. She is influenced by Aymara feminisms to consider potential liberatory avenues for decolonial feminist coalitions.
• M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s “Cartographies of Knowledge and Power” as a way of understanding the function of “transnationalism” and the ways in can rearrange and/or reinforce power and social formations when designing academic syllabi. Their text has given me much to ponder about who is rendered “insiders” and “outsiders” within knowledge production.
• I also cite Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, because it’s one I often return to on a personal and academic level. Her concept of choque helps me envision what might emerge from participants engaging with this syllabus. I am open to the possibility of the syllabus being challenged, critiqued, expanded upon, etc. Using choque here to describe these potential challenges, I hope to view them not merely as a collision or disagreement, but a middle space of tension that produces nuance, contradictions, pluralistic modes and potential outlets for new understandings.

I look at filmmaker and film collectives with roots in Latin America whose aesthetics and production processes exemplify decolonial film praxis, as well. From indigenous film collective Colectivo Los Ingravidos in Tehuacan, Mexico to the experimental ethnographic works of Puerto Rican filmmaker Beatriz Santiago Munoz, to Brazilian quilombo cinema filmmaker Everlane Moraes, to the prismatic video collage works of Payómkawichum/Kumeyaay filmmaker Fox Maxy, these filmmakers engage ritual as a way of processing legacies of coloniality and reclaiming the camera as a possible tool of liberation. Through storytelling, auto-ethnography, collage, and weaving to name a few, these cinematic rituals detangle dominant approaches to filmmaking, and by extension, knowledge production. I am inspired by “ritual” as a decolonial feminist method, rooted in Afro-descended and indigenous spirituality and cosmovisions. Texts may include Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Malidoma Patrice Some among others.

2. Position as a researcher (past work, subjectivity, etc.):

I situate myself in this project as a first-generation Colombian-American gender-expansive person living in the United States. As a child of immigrants, I hold a firm understanding of the ways that borders uphold empire, marginality, violence, and erasure. My experience growing up working-class in a predominantly immigrant Latinx community in South Florida has illuminated my racial and class consciousness to various degrees. At the same time, my family’s ancestral homelands in the Andes of Colombia have reflected back varying narratives around the colonial project of mestizaje and ethnic assimilation. My experience of embodying a queer racialized gendered identity informs my social and political alliances. It is through this commitment to self-knowledge that informs my locational politics and prompts my curiosity about bridging transnational dialogue in my work. Lately, though, I’ve been sitting with the question: what does “transnationalism” really mean? What does transnationalism look like in practice? As a film programmer and budding youth educator, my research often takes me beyond my immediate geographies, even if just through books and screens. I find it very important to be able to make connections across borders, especially as someone engaging cinema as a tool for shifting consciousness. In pursuing this project, my hope is to contribute to a much-needed dialogue for those finding themselves at crossroads within the cinematic landscape, and to be curious about the spaces of tension and the openings those may bring. 

3. This project matters to me and may matter to some others because:

The act of knowledge production is bound with immense political, social, and emotional responsibility. When considering the complexity of “coloniality” and “decoloniality,” I don’t think I/we can solely rely on traditional banking models of education to arrive at a paradigm shift. This is where the suggestion of ritual comes in, to offer different ways of engaging in knowledge production. I invite the emotional, physical, spiritual, and mental to take up space in the process of engaging with this syllabus. There is no right or wrong way to engage, as long as its preceded by curiosity. I especially encourage anyone who identifies with marginalized communities and/or have been dispossessed from their land to engage with this project.

I find excitement in having this be an open access syllabus with the intention of it being a living, evolving project. It’s important to me that artists, scholars, and participants are considered equally in this project, and that the levels of access to their works are considered respectfully and with consideration to their intellectual labor. Only works that are currently available online, or whose permission I have explicitly received to be made available publicly for free will be included.

4. Research question:

My gemini brain is struggling to shave this down to just one question…here are a few for now:

• What does a decolonial feminist praxis want? Who/what does it protect? Who/what does it critique?
• What knowledge do our bodies have that are yearning to made conscious? Where may ritual(s) help in this process? How might the act of ritual rearrange how we perceive and are perceived?
• How does film and/or moving image works allow for expression in ways that verbal language or prose may be limited?